antialias11

If you know and love the books you may come away a bit disappointed. Most of the humor which relies on the reader/listener having some familiarity with literature, philosphy, history is missing. All the more complicated or self-referential bits of humor are missing. It basically feels like a dumbed down version with some unneccesseary additions (e.g. a love story). Forcing the episodic nature of the book(s) into a coherent story was certainly not easy and it shows in the weak cookie-cutter plot. Actor quality is also a mixed bag. Especially the protagonist and main antagonist aren't cast particularly well or just weren't given enough to work with by the script.

That said the kangaroo CGI is good quality, the interaction between it and the other characters feel natural. The movie starts off funny and the pacing works for the most part. Some signature jokes were also incorporated well into the story.

If they take the criticisms to heart I feel they could crank out another one or two of these movies with better quality. There's certainly more than enough source material to draw from.

Just picked this up in a triple pack with Predator I and II (for the nostalgia). Hadn't seen this one when it came out so this was my first go at it.. It has taken me 4 sittings to watch this to the end, because I got bored and turned the movie off each time. No, not for lack of action scenes, but because it quickly descended into "don't care" territory.

First things first - the cast: Erm. I don't remember (and I just switched it off a few minutes ago). Danny Trejo is somewhere in there, but he gets woefully underused. He might have made a really good protagonist along the lines of Schwarzenegger and Glover, but, alas, they went with the people who are neither interesting, nor believable in their roles. I'm not going to comment on the lack of acting skills all around. This is an action movie and no one expects acting skills. But, dear lord, do the actors phone it in. One sentence conversations that convey only hints in low voices that are...what? Supposed to sound enigmatic? Portentious? More like pretentious. I have no idea what the screenwriters were thinking when they pinned down these lines of text. How they got Laurence Fishburne to play in this I'll never know. But he certainly didn't care enough to put any effort in, either.

The music: Predator theme. That's basically it. No alteration or evolution discernible. It's OK, I guess, but where the theme built during the original movie here it's just thrown in whenever.

Screenplay: What screenplay? This movie jumps from plothole to plothole and cliché to cliché, throwing a bunch of pithy one-liners our way. None of the protagonists are likeable. It's not clear how many antagonists there are either, so the stakes are never clear. if they had decided to just nuke the entire protagonist group at minute 30 and replace it with someone else I couldn't have cared less. As for story. In light of the reason for them being there the first two Predator movies make no sense (or vice versa). The attempt at a 'plot twist' makes even less sense. The way they are attacked makes - given the setup - least sense of all.

FX: The effects in this movie look horribly dated (heck, even the effects in the first Predator hold up better - and that was from 1987!)

Final verdict: Avoid. At all costs. It gets 2 stars instead of one because there are theoretically worse movies out there (come to think of it: the Alien vs Predator flics are a contender for this 'honor')