Harry doesn't feel PREDATORS quite earned the 's'

I meant to write this on the Friday of initial release, but sadly my laptop had a critical hard drive failure while I was traveling to that FAMOUS MONSTERS Convention in Indianapolis. That said, most every problem I have with PREDATORS is an issue of scale & releasing. To release PREDATORS in the middle of a summer, even a lackluster summer such as this, is to set an expectation that is absolutely unreasonable for this particular film. Budgeted in the Mid-Thirty Million area... Released by the same company that gave James Cameron over a quarter of a Billion... After we've seen a similarly financed STAR TREK reboot... Well, PREDATORS just doesn't quite have the fire power to blow our minds. Last night, I was watching Stallone's extended cut of JOHN RAMBO and that's how to shoot a balls to the wall action spectacular filled with Holy Shit moments. In PREDATORS, there isn't a single great HOLY SHIT moment. I've seen the film twice. Once at a critic's screening that had the energy of a beached whale. Then the Paramount Theater Premiere, where the film blew the roof off the place. At the first screening, I found myself continually disappointed by how small the film was. At the second screening, I had had hours of thinking about the film, what its purpose was... which was to relaunch the PREDATOR franchise in a new stand alone series. At that level, it succeeds for me. Yes, I would like to see a stand alone PREDATOR series that was far more science fiction than running around present day Earth. The premise of being captured and taken to a hunting preserve planet for the Predators to hunt and hone their skills is pretty outstanding, to me. BUT... only if we get the other dangerous critters that the Predators like to hunt. I get that Robert & Nimrod were attempting to try and recapture the scary 'what the fuck' discovery of the Predators, but this film could serve as a lesson in a way. Once a creature has become Pop Culture Iconography, putting it in the shadows, making it invisible... well it just kind of annoys the audience. It makes the Audience so much further along than the characters on screen, that we tend to feel the characters are stupid because... DUDE, DIDN'T THEY SEE PREDATOR? Of course they didn't. But we have. So going through those same steps, even with the noblest of intentions... makes the film feel underwhelming. I say underwhelming, because even though I pretty much liked every actor in the cast - and LOVED Alice Braga a lot. Even though I loved the practical effects work on the PREDATORS - I even liked the more "Wolf" versions of the PREDATORS... Just making a bigger, meaner Predator, just didn't do enough for me, to feel the film earned its "S". When Adrien Brody says something like, "Now, let's get off this fucking planet!" at the end of the movie, that's a cry out for a sequel, but I'm not sure if the film earned SEQUEL right away. Ending the film where they did, felt like if Cameron had ended ALIENS as soon as they escaped with Newt on the platform. I think most people would have been satisfied with that ending. But not Cameron. He had to give us a mano-a-mano fight for the ages. Load Lifter Ripley versus Alien Queen - all starting with ripping an android in two pieces that just gutted me the first time I saw it. PREDATORS is missing a third act. They couldn't afford to shoot one. They didn't have the money to design some big awesome spectacular closing mind fuck, but they should have. If FOX was committed to relaunching PREDATORS the same way that Paramount committed to STAR TREK. I like a lot of the ideas for characters in the film, but not so much what they did with them. For example, Laurence Fishburne's NOLAND. I love the idea of a badass that has survived various rotations of hunts on the planet. I love that he's adapted to the PREDATORS tech. I love the idea of a man having access to the cloaking and energy weapons. What I don't like? I don't like that you give a character all of that. And then you have him do what that character does. I would have loved it, had he shadowed the team, picking off the PREDATORS as they exposed themselves. Had they gotten off planet, wound up in some kind of battle that got them stuck on the PREDATOR home world and we begin the PLANET HULK / GLADIATOR plotline that this was all headed towards. PREDATORS gets the tone right. Gets the concept headed in a right direction, but it just doesn't do enough to make me 100% happy with the film. I wanted and needed more. Especially for a Summer Release. Had PREDATORS come out in February or September... Expectations might have felt right, but in the Summer, when our cinema loving ape brains are conjuring gargantuan awesome desires that get sated by a film like INCEPTION... A film like PREDATORS aggravates. I know that a PREDATORS film with no limits would blow our collective minds. That said... TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE had over double the budget and wasn't nearly half as good. I'm dying to see a great, large scale science fiction action adventure using the PREDATORS concept. I just don't know if we'll ever see it. But I hope.