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61%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #1,066
...out of 20,725 movies
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Ten years after a band of mercenaries first battled a vicious alien, the invisible creature from another world has returned to Earth -- and this time, it's drawn to the gang-ruled and ravaged city of Los Angeles. When it starts murdering drug dealers, detective-lieutenant Mike Harrigan and his police force set out to capture the creature, ignoring warnings from a mysterious government agent to stay away.
--TMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: August 18, 2004
Mike Harrigan is an LAPD police officer, who is working on some cases between rival drug-dealing gangs. Apparently, the tension between these two gangs has turned 1997 Los Angeles into quite the war-zone. When a group of guys from the Mexican gang are all slaughtered, the cops think that the Jamaican gang did it; then, when a group of guys from the Jamaicans get slaughtered in a similar fashion, Harrigan starts to think that there's somebody else at work here. After one of his friends gets killed by this thing, Harrigan takes it personal, and decides to hunt down the thing that's killing off all these people. However, a CIA man by the name of Keyes is trying to prevent Harrigan from investigating things, telling him that he'll handle it from here on out.
We're all set with a basic plot right here, which is kind of similar to that of the first film in the series. They basically decided to remake the original, but place it in the inner city instead of in the jungle. Things could have worked out with this setting, and hell, could have even been better; a city would make for some much more interesting scenes than a jungle could. But instead, we're treated to a horrid sequel which decides to focus more attention on the cops, the drug-dealers and the sub-plot between Harrigan and Keyes than on the Predator itself. While building up your lead characters in a film is always a smart move, there was way too much of it here for a film of this nature. In the opening scene, we witness a twenty-minute fire-fight between the cops and the Mexicans, and we see constant images on various televisions of similar things going on elsewhere. I do believe that this was enough to give the viewer the impression that the city is in chaos, but instead, we're shown similar scenes time after time with no real purpose other than to offer up more gun-fight scenes. The main problem here is that for the majority of the film, the focus is either on the cops, the gangs, or the interactions between Harrigan and Keyes... the Predator only seems to serve as a back-drop to the movie during this time. Things do pick up more around the end, but by then, it's far too late to save the movie, even with the subtle little nudge to another film in the genre and the new weaponry picked up by the Predator.
Danny Glover plays Harrigan in one of the worst casting choices in the history of film. While he's not a bad actor, he's definitely not on the top of my list for favorite male actors... but he definitely did not belong in this role. After seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger pull out a great performance in the original (I can't believe I just typed that), Danny Glover as his replacement in the sequel just does not work out. The man doesn't look like the type of guy that would be hunting down and killing a Predator, nor does he pull out a convincing performance while doing so; seeing him do all of this was just a step or two up from casting Steve Urkel in the lead role... but maybe that was just me. Gary Busey plays his human-nemesis Keyes, and while I'm normally a fan of his work, he manages to put out a pretty sorry performance here as well. Perhaps this was due to the extremely lame character he was given, or the horrid lines he was handed, but something just didn't work out this time around for ol' Busey. The rest of the cast isn't much better, with Maria Conchita Alonso playing fellow detective Leona Cantrell in a stereotypical sassy-Mexican-woman role, and Bill Paxton playing Jerry Lambert, your typical wise-cracking police officer.
Overall, this may appeal to hardcore fans of the original, but it doesn't even come close to comparing to it in quality. It would only be worth a rental if you just can't get enough of that Predator action and can brave through more than a handful of lame key elements in a film to get it. 4/10 from myself.
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#1:
Big D
- added August 21, 2004 at 6:18pm
I know what happened in (real life) 1997...there
was no war in Los Angeles. Anyway, it's a great
movie.
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#2:
Crispy
- added November 13, 2004 at 10:55pm
how in the world did you come to the conclusion
that "They basically decided to remake the
original, but place it in the inner city instead
of in the jungle" The plot lines have nothing to
do with each other, neither do the kills. In the
first one, the Predator was methodical, taking
them out one by one. This Predator normally jumps
into the middle of a cowd and fucks up 8-12 people
at a time. However, I will admit you have a point
about it focusing to much on the cops.
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#3:
dadarulz
- added May 22, 2005 at 4:20am
Oh God... Pretty funny to watch, but such a
shame-of-a-movie... The first one is a classic
tho.
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#4:
Ginose
- added September 15, 2005 at 4:18pm
Hey! To hell with those who rant negativly about
this movie. I own the 2 Predator movies (I say 2
because in my mind AVP dosen't exist) and this was
a great movie, it shows that even in an urban
jungle, Predator still reigns supreme.
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#5:
Rik
- added September 22, 2007 at 1:50am
I loved the first one. This one is not THAT bad,
but can get a little draggy in some scenes. I
guess what the director is trying to do is to
portray the predator as a REAL predator. Assassin
like.
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#6:
Lucid Dreams
- added July 23, 2010 at 7:20pm
Not as good as the first, but I thought they did a
fine job on this. 7/10
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