Saw this tonight and thought it was very meh. Some great moments early like The Predator break out scene but even the great moments had dumb ones in them. The super pred wasn’t very good and no larger a threat than the one in The original really. I did think the cast was good and liked some of the humour, Tom Jane especially got some lol moments.
And the ending, wow, didn’t know what to make of that. Said from the start they just have just done a follow up to Predators, and for me Shane Black was never right for this.
As for McTiernan, his career sort of took a nose dive about 15 years ago, post Die Hard With a Vengeance. I guess his Thomas Crown Affair remake did sort of OK. Basic and Rollerball were both flops. 13th Warrior was a huge flop.
I'm in the minority that I like AvP: R over AvP. It was gory and violent while the other was neutered and lame. I never had a problem with the darknesss, looked fine in my theater, and it being mean spirited was awesome.
Currently rewatching Predators and I LOVE THIS MOVIE. I loved it in 2010 and I still love it now. This is a goddamn Predator movie. It’s economically told. It has a stellar cast. The tone is exactly right. I still don’t understand why this movie wasn’t a bigger hit with fans. It hits every touchstone you would want while expanding the lore just right IE not a huge leap, but just a couple of steps deeper.
That is at least an ******* methhead. I’m not bothered by it. I have a bigger problem with helpless babies and pregnant women put on the chopping block. It’s edgelord “extreme” and it’s cheap and ugly.
Looking way too far into it. Amazing genre movie, but it's not a deconstruction about the ills of macho 80s dudebros. Predator's pretty much the pinnacle of celebration macho 80s dudebros in a straight-up rip-roaring action-adventure sense. No more, no less. There's really nothing more "tough guy machismo" than losing all his toys along the way and having to win the day with just hero-guy brawn & alpha male military skills & ingenuity.
And doesn't pretty much every action movie, before or since, have a bunch of tough guys biting the dust along the way? Predator's just macho dudes getting wasted by a more macho vicious demon-alien, who in turn is out-machoed by Austria's famous biceps-and-cigars testosterone man.
You start so many of your posts with this exact kind of condescending crap. You do it on a nearly daily basis in the politics forum. Stop it.
You're also oddly devoted to propping up a movie you haven't seen yet by trying to convince people that they're wrong for loving a bonefide classic. Stop it.
Back at ya, I guess? We're all snarky stooges, hakuna matata.
I love Predator too. It is legitimately a classic. But let's not try to start making out it's some post-modern deconstruction of what a muscles-and-machine-guns cheesefest is. That was pretty obviously never the intention behind the thing, it's embracing all of that if anything.
It's just a particularly accomplished version of that. Which is fine.
That is at least an ******* methhead. I’m not bothered by it. I have a bigger problem with helpless babies and pregnant women put on the chopping block. It’s edgelord “extreme” and it’s cheap and ugly.
I mean, how many mothers and helpless babies do you think died in that Metropolis battle in Man of Steel of which Superman didn't seem to care about those people at all.
Currently rewatching Predators and I LOVE THIS MOVIE. I loved it in 2010 and I still love it now. This is a goddamn Predator movie. It’s economically told. It has a stellar cast. The tone is exactly right. I still don’t understand why this movie wasn’t a bigger hit with fans. It hits every touchstone you would want while expanding the lore just right IE not a huge leap, but just a couple of steps deeper.
To me it relied too much on nostalgia. It repeated too many beats from the original, re-used too many quotes. It takes 3 "Super" Predators to hunt down a randomly thrown together group of individuals, while it took 1 Predator in the original to kill 2 units of highly trained soldiers, with Dutch being the sole survivor of his unit. The original Predator gets crapped on by the new bigger and badder Predator. These are all the reasons I didn't enjoy it. It might be a decent Movie, but a lousy sequel.
Exactly how I felt on it watching it through again the other night. It's really solidly made, nothing really to complain about other than some pretty average looking prosthetics and the lame "uber super-duper predators" concept that The Predator is guilty of too. But it's just so...obvious, and feels kind of fanboy-pandering somehow. Like, I have no idea why you wouldn't just watch the original movie instead, if this is what you're in the mood to watch.
It's basically fine though. There's just no real reason for it to even exist other than as a tribute 25 years later.
Back at ya, I guess? We're all snarky stooges, hakuna matata.
I love Predator too. It is legitimately a classic. But let's not try to start making out it's some post-modern deconstruction of what a muscles-and-machine-guns cheesefest is. That was pretty obviously never the intention behind the thing, it's embracing all of that if anything.
It's just a particularly accomplished version of that. Which is fine.
I think there’s something to the idea. It presents these hyper masculine, hyper competent badasses that wipe out a small army without losing a single guy. And then one creature starts slaughtering them, and they all start to lose it. They start panicking and acting nuts and they scream in sheer terror. It’s perhaps unintentional, but it plays as subversive now.
I don’t have a rule. It’s case by case. The baby stuff in Dawn of the Dead knows how next level it is and I think it treats it with the right weight. Or conversely the new Puppet Master movie: it has an absolutely insane scene involving a pregnant woman. But it’s so obscenely over the top that it loops around into being comedic. In both cases, I think the filmmakers handled the tone right.
I think there’s something to the idea. It presents these hyper masculine, hyper competent badasses that wipe out a small army without losing a single guy. And then one creature starts slaughtering them, and they all start to lose it. They start panicking and acting nuts and they scream in sheer terror. It’s perhaps unintentional, but it plays as subversive now.
That's just to show how hot-**** the predator is though. It's not some statement on cliche action movies, it's just "outbadass the badasses" until Ahnuld "outbadasses the badass who outbadassed the badasses". Pretty clearly McTiernan's not the type of director to get into deconstructions, basically everything he's ever done has been played straight down the line, what you see is what you get.
That's just to show how hot-**** the predator is though. It's not some statement on cliche action movies, it's just "outbadass the badasses" until Ahnuld "outbadasses the badass who outbadassed the badasses". Pretty clearly McTiernan's not the type of director to get into deconstructions, basically everything he's ever done has been played straight down the line, what you see is what you get.
Again, disagreed. The thing that made DIE HARD stick out was how against the norm its protagonist, and the casting of that protagonist, was for the era. John McClane is so subversive and a deconstruction of what an action hero even was. I think McTeirnan is more clever than you're giving him credit for.
"In a decade where every action hero looks like an unstoppable roid monster, no one kicks more ass than the guy from moonlighting, who looks like your dad."
Again, disagreed. The thing that made DIE HARD stick out was how against the norm its protagonist, and the casting of that protagonist, was for the era. John McClane is so subversive and a deconstruction of what an action hero even was. I think McTeirnan is more clever than you're giving him credit for.
Right with the casting, yeah, Willis was pretty much comedy-guy before that. But the "everyman getting in over his head" archetype didn't start with Die Hard, that's a pretty broad thing. The wisecracking smartass thing was the fresh part, the actual structure of that movie's still pretty classic tried-and-true, just amped up to 11 for the 80s. It's sort of meta in a sense, Gruber mocking the whole American cowboy schtick, but end of the day it's still basically "individualist troublemaker macho guy using guile to go it alone and outdo all the authorities in taking out the evil mother****ers".
Saw this last night. I enjoyed it overall. Sure, it was a dumb movie with some stupid and flat-out weird scenes that left me scratching my head, like when those soldiers show up to pick up Olivia Munn at the beginning and there are all these weird shots of dogs. Anyone know what that was about? And then you have Munn, a scientist who five minutes ago was scared ****less by the Predator, goes chasing after it with a tranquilizer gun and leaps onto the roof of a moving bus. I mean, huh?
Anyway though, I liked most of the cast (Munn included). Once Holbrook and the "looneys" meet up, the movie becomes a lot of fun. Holbrook and Rhodes in particular making a good action bro duo, and I'd personally love to see these guys as Hal Jordan and John Stewart in a GL movie. A Holbrook/Sterling K. Brown pairing would also work in that regard. Speaking of Brown, he was also very good and
it was cool to see him in a villainous role. That was a nice change of pace for him. Though his death was a letdown. I wasn't even sure if he died at first because it happened so quickly.
Also, Key and Jane had a lot of great moments. Yvonne Strahovski was completely wasted though. That woman is a force of nature (fans of The Handmaid's Tale can attest to this) and I couldn't believe they didn't have her come along when they were going searching for her son. But I guess only one woman is allowed in the group. Tremblay did well but the whole cliche of the brilliant autistic kid is getting old.
Anyway, the action is mostly good and there were a few twists I didn't see coming, even if some of them didn't make any sense. I'd recommend seeing it in Dolby Surround Sound because it enhances everything. It's a fun movie, though not necessarily a good one.
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