And here I thought you were only allowed to horribly rape a franchise once.

WARNING : CONTAINS SPOILERS

AvP:R is another film which shouts "We're stuffing two badass characters into one lazily thought out movie and making millions!". It starts off with a shiny Predator gunship floating around in orbit. Cue a reasonable action sequence with various warriors being mullered by shiny xenomorphs, and a chestburster with mandibles popping out of a Predator corpse for some fresh air.

Next thing we know, the ship falls out of the sky, and crashlands outside your typical picturesque American town. A father and his boy out hunting stumble across the downed craft, and to paraphrase VGCats, are introduced to a mouthfull of alien wing-wong. Apart from various hobos being eaten, this is most of the action you'll see for the next 45 minutes.

Since this is a modern-day action film, the next huge chunk of the film has no actual relevance to the plot. There's your average high school kid who gets beaten up over some lass, an army mother arriving back home (presumably from Iraq), a troubled brother coming back to town, etc, yadda yadda yadda. When I come to see an action movie, I want blood/guts/carnage/delete as appropiate, not a solid hour of badly acted social commentary and teenage angst. I actually cheered in the middle of the cinema when the love interest was pinned to the wall by giant metal disks.

What galls me the most about the film is that it has none of the atmosphere of the previous films it owes its name to. The two series had this overpowering sense of claustrophobia, which caused genuine terror within the audiences. Predator had this dense, massive jungle where anything and everything could be lurking in the next bush, ready to blast you in half with a plasma rifle, and Aliens had its signature gantries and walkways where there was never silence, only the clanking of metal and skittering of claws as another friendly beast scuttled ever closer to rip your face off.

The thing is, AVP:R could have done this. They had the environment where people could run around in a blind panic, being picked off properly, one by one, in cramped close-quarters. The best they could do was to have someone see something in a waste pipe in the sewers and then run out like a little girl. The violence wasn't even done right a lot of the time; there was almost a slapstick-esque moment where a couple of stoners had their faces blasted away by the armoured, dreaded ugly, and the policeman being skinned was something out of a bad horror film. Oh, and I can't forget the ending. It's as though they read somewhere that really good films have really enigmatic endings, and then lost the point somewhere completely.

I really can't stress enough how awful this film is. It's "Motherfucking Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane" bad. The only redeeming quality it has is the fact that it has both Aliens and Predators in it, but honestly, if that were enough to make a good film, we'd still be talking about Daredevil.

Seriously, avoid it like you would a dirty pirate hooker.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.