I have seen it. I wish I hadn't. I'll review it, no real spoilers just a lot of complaints.
It's a mess, I don't even know where it went wrong. Like did it start out a mess they could never fix or were the reshoots the mess? It's like a weird hodge podge of concepts and none of them really stick. It's like an r-rated comedy romp that happens to have the Predator for vast swathes of the film, which I'd have been ok with, but then they switch back to ultra serious and that doesn't work because everyone is still in comedy mode or just spent an hour and a bit wise cracking. It's as unsettling as watching a grieving widower cracking jokes at the funeral while simultaneously bursting into tears.
Most of it makes no sense, like at all. You spend a lot of the film just sitting there thinking "that makes no sense and they are never going to explain it." But I was enjoying it so I let it slide, it was just a comedy action film that was doing it's thing. It kept happening though, the more it went on the less sense it made. The Predators' motivations seem to randomly shift, characters are all over the place, you can never get a handle on anyone or anything. It's got this weird thing going on with dogs, I dunno why, but it had several dog scenes which made no sense. I wouldn't even have been surprised if they started having the dogs talk. One looked like it was supposed to be edited out, it literally cuts to a shot of a dog running, then back to the action and you never see the dog again. It had already disappeared once before this. It's a sloppy mess. The only explanation I have is fecking voodoo magic, man.
The actors were all fine, the writing was the problem. Olivia Munn is a scientist, by the end of the film you wouldn't be surprised to see her in a boiler room wearing a chainmail vest having a knife fight with Arnie. They never explain her. She handles it all surprisingly well. The writing, again, was the problem.
I saw some reviews complain about the jokes "pussy jokes in 2018!" There was nothing wrong with the actual jokes, they fitted and were in line with the goofy tone of this and the jokes in the original. The real issue is the jokes that were set up so someone could deliver dialogue or lines that were either taken from the first film or sound like lines uttered in that film. They are just awkward and forced and really distracting.
All the talk of the last half hour being the main the problem was very true, that's when it falls apart and destroys any good will from the first part of the film. Because it had been stupid, sloppy and weird up until that point, but it was fun. Then it just went completely off the rails, like they all just stopped giving a feck and just filmed the first thing they could think of. People in the cinema were laughing at the very end and they weren't laughing with it.
If they are going to do another film then they should just From Dusk Til Dawn it. Make it a film about something else then about halfway through have the Predator turn up and start hunting people. Because they did not seem to have a single clue what to do with this or had several clues and couldn't pick one. I dunno, nothing makes sense. Things happen just because.
