Predators

A group of ultimate badasses and a doctor (Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Topher Grace, Walton Goggins, Mahershala Ali, Oleg Taktarov, Danny Trejo & Louis Ozawa Changchien) are parachuted into a mysterious jungle not really remembering how they got there. At first they're suspicious of each other but then must work together when they realise they are being hunted by the titular Predators.

Each character is an emblematic badass here to represent the movie version of their own badass tribe. Black badass dies first, Prison badass shivs a Predator, Japanese badass finds a katana (on an alien planet) and takes his shirt off thereby displaying Yakuza tattoos to fight a Predator with it in the rain, Russian badass is big and dumb but goodhearted, Mexican badass actually dies first but it was so uneventful I forgot, doctor badass is actually serial killer, female badass cares for others and is love interest of taciturn big white hero badass. They almost make a point of then not having (or sharing/using) names.

This makes it sound like I hated it, I didn't. They very clearly lay the stereotypes out, in a very self aware fashion. They're each the distilled versions of that type of character and they have to be with each of them getting reasonable screen time. There's no time for actual characterisation.

The action is good but really suffers from switching to night time halfway through so it's all quite dark on screen from that point onwards.

It desperately wants to be Aliens and even does callback dialogue that paraphrases classic lines. They go inside a huge abandoned mining vehicle (Laurence Fishburn's lair) and it so wants to be the insides of the Nostromo crossed with the Derelict.

It aims for a little introspection at one point ("we're the Predators of our own world") but this stalls, its not what this movie is for and everybody knows it.

They threw some real screen talent at this but it falls between two stools. There's too little work on the characterisation to be serious and it's not campy enough to work that way either. Solidly made and hard to criticise specifically it's just bland.

6/10 I remember it being poorly received but it's not bad just not great.