Predators was not bad, but with a cast like that there was really no way it could match the original. The charisma of the cast just wasn't there, and really, there's no way any cast can match the charisma of the original's meat-headed muscle-bound cast, save for the cast of the upcoming soon to be number-one-movie-in-the-universe, The Expendables. I
do blame Rodriguez for ruining a good thing though. At the start of the film, when things were still moving along at a slow pace thanks to exploration on an unknown planet, the suspense reminded me of the first Alien film, when the colonists and later the science team were exploring, completely lost and utterly bewildered with what was happening on a foreign planet. Instead Rodriguez waved his hands a little bit, and within 5 minutes the entire plot of the film is revealed to the cast a la Dr Jennings in Howard the Duck:
Howard the Duck - Dr. Jenning Special
Furthermore, the whole idea behind the Predators gathering the baddest and the best from across the globe's elite fighting forces was quite frankly, retarded. Well, the idea wasn't retarded, but the implementation was a monumental fuckup, to go down forever in history as one of the biggest monumental fuckups in action movie history. While having the FBI's #1 most wanted run around with nothing but a prison shank in a jungle full of alien hunters was kind of funny for the one of 2 jokes they through in, for the most part I was just angry and frustrated with the writers for penning in the most stereotypical characters possible from any and every popular militant group they could think of. I mean, really? Did they really think it would add to the movie if they wrote in a quiet asian guy with a deagle and a sword and called him yakuza? How the fuck is he even supposed to compare to Heavy Weapons Guy from Russia by measures of shear badass? And yet, he did. Somehow an asian with a pistol and a sword managed to do more killing than a fucking Russian with a minigun, grenades, and seemingly unlimited ammunition. At least the Russian befriended the Medic and had a daughter named Sasha....
I mean, don't get me wrong, the movie wasn't bad. But I think they made a lot of writing decisions based solely on how much they would dissociate this film from its predecessors (which Rodriguez even said he was going for in many interviews), logic and common sense be damned. I can appreciate that they didn't want to rehash a classic; I can even appreciate the fact that maybe Rodriguez felt he couldn't do the sequel justice and tried to break from it entirely. But in the end, he did neither very well. We still had a group of alleged badasses in the jungle, and they still ran around blowing shit to smithereens, generally not taking names on account of apparently none of them has ever passed a course in marksmanship. I really wanted to love this movie, and after hearing interviews where Rodriguez said he wanted to do something completely different from the first film, I was ready to watch it with a completely open mind. But when I finally sat down and watched the movie, by and large it was a rehash of the original, except with a really shitty script. I mean fuck, AVP was bad, but I still loved it because it was something different and yet still badass, even if the script completely sucked.
Also, I got into a free screening of The Sorceror's Apprentice last night, and it was a lot better than I expected given Cage's more recent films, which include gems like Ghost Rider, Wicker Man, and Bangkok Dangerous