I saw this on Blu-Ray. Definitely better than the AvP movies and had its share of cool moments but nothing special.
They ripped off too many things from the first movie and I know they're supposed to be homages but to me they just felt like rip-offs. The minigun, "Do it kill me now!" the Billy-esque Yakuza guy (real Yakuza probably wouldn't know what to do with a samurai sword, btw), etc.
Adrian Brody's character figured out way too many things way too fast "This is a game reserve, and we're the game." How the fuck did you figure that out? There were at least 5 times he did something like that.
Lawrence Fishburne's character also seemed pointless. He goes out of his way to save Topher Grace so that he can smoke them out later in the movie? What was the point of that? And then he's gone very shortly after. Pointless. And what was that thing that was chasing Topher? Another animal? I was a bit confused about that as well.
I didn't mind the plot twist at the end with Topher. He was somewhat interesting unlike almost every other character. Adiran Brody made a surprisingly decent action star, most of the others were undeveloped cliches just waiting to get killed.
Danny Trejo death scene was also cool.
Also the deus ex machina at the beginning makes no sense. How do they get the recon on all these people and magically transport them to this planet? It did feel like they ripped off the beginning of cube, saw, etc. with characters appearing somewhere strange and having no memory of how they got there.
It wasn't a horrible movie and was quite entertaining for the 1:45 that it lasted, however it wasn't great nor worth a re-watch. The reason why the first Predator movie was so cool was because we as the audience have no idea what kind of monster that they're facing. So the fear of Arnie and his crew is the same as our fear. Unfortunately with the sequels we know everything there is to know about these creatures and we're just waiting for the characters in the movie to get caught up with us. And since we know everything about them, they're not as interesting anymore. Aliens worked because it expanded the scope of Alien by taking it from a horror movie to an action movie with a vietnam war allegory. Plus it had great characters, great script, great pacing, etc. And whereas the first Alien had only 1 Alien, Aliens had multiple aliens and the queen alien. Predators was basically the same as Predator but with a worse script, worse characters, and enemies that were uninteresting because we knew everything about them already (except the pointless super-Predators that hate the regular predators).
If I wasn't a huge predator fan I'd say the movie was a lame sci-fi action movie, but because I am such a huge fan of Predator I found it to be fun and entertaining, but also underwhelming at the same time. The AV club review of this summed it up well saying "They didn't keep it fresh and added nothing new to the series."
What happened to that scene where Adrien have like 20 laser sights on him though? It was in the trailer but not in the final version? That was the coolest part, damnit
