Nice penguin, pity about the rest of it

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2006)

It could have been so good. Bring together the two most fearsome off world life forms in movie history in a face off and then drop some poor schmucks in the meat grinder along with them.
Sounds good doesn't it? What a pity therefore that five films of back story (all right, six if you must count Alien Resurrection!) were all but disregarded in favour of this dreadful mess.
OK, lets get the good points out of the way first as it will be quicker. The soundtrack was a little generic but good and the penguin was cute.
Now for the bad bits, I hope you are sitting comfortably as this could take a while.
First the cast, some interesting choices and bringing in the original Mr Weyland in the form of the now very old looking Lance Henriksen was a good idea but the rest of the cast (with the possible exception of the aforementioned penguin of course) were forgettable, even the one or two established actors such as Colin Salmon.
The characters were woefully underdeveloped but in the majority this didn't matter too much as many of them were fairly swiftly dispatched in one PG-13 style ungruesome manner or another. It is remarkable though that Mr Weyland hired the best so called experts money could buy yet most of them seemed to know about as much on their so called specialist subject as I know about nuclear physics.
They weren't helped of course by a ropey script, some really atrocious dialogue and one of Hollywood's most infamous and indeed talent less directors.
Then there are our two main players themselves. The Aliens did their bit but for the majority of the time they seemed to content themselves with lurking on over hanging ledges and laughing themselves silly at the Predators.
The Predators provided the aforementioned amusement by being lumbering and inept beyond belief, the fact that they also appeared to have overdosed on coffee, doughnuts and pies adding to the unintentional comedy.
If this was a stand alone alien life forms having a punch up story (i.e. the Alien and Predator films did not exist) then this would just about worked but it isn't so it doesn't, and quite badly at that! The one thing that marked out the original Alien films apart from their overall attention to detail, excellent lighting, photography, cast choices etc was that after watching one of these, you would look around you in the dark, a little nervous as to whether an Alien was lurking just over your shoulder waiting to pounce, they were that good.
This family friendly padded rubbish had none of this gritty tension and even those parts of the 'plot' that were all but lifted verbatim from the original Alien and Predator films were so badly used, filmed and directed that even the most die hard fans of the two series could do nothing more than shake their head slowly in sheer disgust.
The really bad news is that this stinking turkey is to get a sequel - WHY? Has the cinema going public not suffered enough from this one. One predicts the murky world of straight to video may be the sequel's (better than deserved) fate.... I hope! Strictly a film for the bargain bin only, and then only if you cannot find your Alien ultimate box set or Predator DVD's.