95% set-up, 5% action

Rating: 2/10 (24 April 2007)

PREDATOR is one of the most trite action films ever. Almost everything about it is predictable. Not one genuine surprise in the whole film. The story itself never tries to go beyond it's B-movie premise: an alien (echoing ALIEN but looking like a Rastaman on steroids) arrives on earth to hunt humans for fun. The group the alien chooses to hunt are a bunch of soldiers (echoing the soldiers in ALIENS and Arnie in COMMANDO) who are on a mission in the middle of a jungle. The group is fairly large and once they figure out that the alien is there to kill them, they prepare to fight it, setting up booby traps all over the jungle. But then if you blink, you'll miss the part where everyone in the large group is killed, which, predictably, only leaves Arnold to fight mano a mano with the alien.
The film and its B-movie story could have worked if the action was actually great. But it's not. It's all set-up. Aside from the typically overdone and unrealistic Rambo action at the beginning, once the action between humans and alien starts happening, it lasts maybe 10 minutes. And the climax is a total let-down: the alien blows himself up instead of dying in the hands of Arnie. No satisfactory "release" here. What's really bad about this stupid scene is that the alien is actually laughing as he's about to blow himself up. Watching the predator laugh like that was as alien as a big fat villain, who's in thew same predicament, laughing his head off in a James Bond movie.
Boring characters, unimaginative story, inert action. The special effects are cheesy (the electrical sparks are really bad). The film's biggest letdown is the predator himself, who's an unimaginative creation: it looks silly, with the little pivoting gun on its shoulder. The predator is supposed to see things in a special way but it looks more blind than anything else. But worst of all, when the alien is invisible, well, everyone sees him! If I was the alien, I would ask for my money back for such a worthless cloaking device.
In a fight between the alien in ALIEN and the predator, the alien would kick this loser's butt in a nanosecond.