Possibly the most disappointing movie of this year. Somehow this movie managed to completely ignore all of the things that made the original film so great. No tension, no fear, just meat headed shooting and terrible macho one liners. And don’t even get me started on the fact that the greatest hunting animal in the universe had dogs to help him hunt…

The Predator has more of an ensemble cast then other entries, with Boydd Holbrook and Oliver Munn headlining and the likes of Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane and even Alfie Allen supporting. The film opens with one space ship escaping another and crash landing on Earth. This is discovered by Quinn (Holbrook), the find is taken away to be studied and Quinn is committed as mentally unfit and sent away with a group of soldiers who are mentally unfit. Think Mad Murdock from the A-Team and you won't be far wrong. The alien recovered from the spaceship is a ‘predator’ and escapes but not before we learn he has human DNA as part of his make up. The alien that was chasing him at the start shows up, is a much bigger ‘Predator’ and we have a hunter becoming the hunted scenario. The action scenes are pretty good but rely very heavily on CGI particularly the second larger predator. Where the original 1987 film's special FX still holds up I fear these are already starting to look a little dated. The group Quinn finds himself with, who refer to themselves as ‘the loons’ are fun to be around and make the film more entertaining than it has right to be. My main issue with this is, does it need to be a Predator film? It loses the sense of the franchise when the Yautja (what the predators are actually called, I've just looked it up) isn't actually hunting anyone. This film would have worked just as well, better even with it being a generic alien landing. Then the human/combined DNA wouldn't have felt so jarring. Instead of going against the canon of an existing franchise, it would have been setting up its own original one. The Predator is not a bad film but it suffers from trying to twist an interesting concept into an already established franchise.

Everybody’s heard the saying, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” Most films embody this statement, shooting too high and coming out average. "The Predator," on the other hand, does the exact opposite of this statement. It seems like the filmmakers didn't care enough to shoot for the moon. They shot for average at best and missed badly, leaving us with a film that feels like an empty shell of what it could have been.