Alien Vs. Predator
Starring Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova and Lance Henriksen; directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
About the only thing good in this showdown from sci-fi movie Hell is the tagline: “whoever wins, we lose”. Although, unfortunately, the “we” referred to ends up being less the fictional human race implied by the movie and more us poor audience members subjected to Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest desecration of perfectly good franchises.
Just as the director sucked the soul and scares out of Resident Evil, he’s torn every ounce of dread, tension and awe from Sigourney and Arnold’s respective flagships. Even worse, this is not the camp-spectacular last summer’s Freddy Vs. Jason was. Humorless and deadly serious, AVP seems to think its senseless plot about some Aztec/Egyptian/Mayan pyramid lost for centuries underneath the Antarctican icebergs isn’t half-baked or mentally deficient.
Of course this Lara Croft relic-reject is just a ruse to place some ridiculously good-looking scientists right in the middle of a brewing intergalactic war. Next thing we know, shifty passageways and invisible Predator invaders are butchering the cast in order of credits-prominence. Sometimes the death-list shifts for a heroic “I’ll go down fighting” number but we never miss the perennial courage-tester, where the heroine must kill one of her ‘possessed’ own, to save her skin.
Sure, disturbing body counts are essential to umm, establish the violent power of these ferocious nemeses, but the formulaic order is tragically predictable and the necessary level of bloody gore is missing. How dare the camera cut to black for a distant scream when we paid to see R-rated carnage!
To be expected, the no-name cast is as bland as ever, with Sanaa Lathan leading the pack as a pro-mountaineer nature-guide named Alexa who represents the damsel-in-distress meets wise-worrywart, who cautions the team to no avail. Lance Henriksen (of TV’s Milennium) plays the eccentric rich-man willing to risk the usual everything for a taste of discovery’s fortune. Raoul Bova is the sexiest of the male scientists, and therefore is best candidate for both love-interest and longest-surviving male cast-member.
While everything is by-the-numbers, things get interesting, or at least unintentionally hilarious when our heroine teams with the Predators, uses a carved out Alien head as an acid-protection shield and runs, silhouetted and in slow-mo, from a deadly explosion. Apparently Batman & Robin served as artistic inspiration for somebody out there.
And there’s lots of awesomely bad back-story about the origins of the Pyramids that would shame even the Catwoman history books. Then again, laughter, however it is achieved as a reaction, is never truly a bad thing. Too bad the rest of the flick is mostly boring. The overwrought sets may look cool (whale-bone graveyards do catch the eye) but they’re fairly repetitive. The story is cheesy and the characters are worse, even by Hollywood franchise-fighting standards. When all the dust settles, who really cares?
Rating: One star and a half out of five