The first movie deconstructed the tropes of the 80s action movies, presenting us a squad of supposedly undefeatable cold-blooded professional murderers, and making them face something beyond their understanding and their capabilities. Brute force wouldn't work anymore, so the protagonist had to adapt and rediscover his primal self. In a way, it was a film about embracing nature. The sequel starts off promisingly. A new interesting setting, reiteration of action movie tropes, a glimpse into something darker. This movie was ripe to expand on everything that made the first one good. But instead of deconstructing action tropes, it revels in them. The Predator is attracted to the city by the barbarity. Where the first movie implied that we, as a civilization, were morphing into something monstrous with the help of technology (the explosion at the end visually echoing a nuclear strike), this one implies the opposite: that our primal selves are monstrous, and we have degraded back to them. The main attraction for the Predator is no longer the highly-organized war-making machine, but a bunch of thugs who cut people up for ritualistic purposes. Where's the sport in such a hunt? The protagonist, meanwhile, never evolves past his tough-guy persona, screaming at everyone and beating people up. Even in the face of extraordinary he seems completely unfazed. It seems, in the director and writer's perception this is the man for the job. A simple brute is the man who can deal with the unknown. However, the worst thing about this movie has nothing to do with themes or metaphors. Its main problems are those of pacing, editing and scale. While the first movie gradually submerged you in the atmosphere of dread and suspense, this one quickly devolves into a plain action movie, where the antagonist has no mystery about him and simply plays the role of a powerful enemy. Murders occur almost randomly and carry little to no weight. The stakes are raised from the very start and barely ever rise above the original level. I realize that after what we've seen in the first movie, the same gradual reveal wouldn't work. But that's not what I want either. The greatest thing about the first movie (besides Bill Duke's amazing performance) was that it kept you wondering what this creature was and where it came from. There was an almost cosmic horror underlying the immediate dread of the situation. I think the sequel would've worked much better if the overall premise dealt with events that were larger in scale. For example, if instead of another singular Predator, this was a group hunt, or a scouting expedition to prepare for an invasion. Anything that would position this movie as the next step in the story. An expansion of the universe. In a way, this could've been to Predator what Aliens was to Alien, but it didn't do that, choosing to attempt to recapture the success of the predecessor by copying its formula. And yes, we did get to see a spaceship with several Predators in the end, but by that point the movie was already a failure. And it's a damn shame, because it had so much going for it. P.S. What seems like a minor issue, but what might actually be the biggest problem in the grand scheme of things is how Predators' voices are now barely even distorted. This, along with a couple of comical scenes with a child and an old lady, trivializes the Predators as a threat. Makes them non-scary and human-like. Makes them a species that can be reasoned with, as opposed to something foreign, something that operates on its own unfathomable rules of morality. This trivialization will manifest itself in the consequent movies, and this enigmatic creature will never rise above the level set in the first movie. And this makes me very sad, because the original Predator is one of the greatest examples of a sci-fi action-thriller with horror elements (up there with Aliens).