Writer: Ezekiel Lee Zhiang Yang

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Watch this if you liked: "Aliens", "Predator"

The unavoidable sequel to the first "AVP" is upon us! Carefully planned for a worldwide release on Christmas Day 2007, the good people of Twentieth Century Fox repeated their secret trick - keep the press from watching it first!

The trick works because "AVP2", much like the prequel, does exactly what it says on the tin. In other words, it's the sort of bad movie that you just have to see because everybody else would be seeing it and there are no other movies worth seeing at the time anyway. To afford us some level of pride, having read no reviews let alone negative ones because there are none available, we can proudly buy the tickets and complain to others later that we had no clue. That's the magic of marketing.

What's the magic of "AVP2" this time around? Well, it's a little "Aliens" and much more "Predator" but very little "versus", if you're on the ball.

Picking up precisely where the first left off, the chestburster (learn your "Aliens" terminology!) in the Predator ship turns out to be a Predalien if you haven't already guessed. A mini-battle ensues and some poor aiming results in the convenient crash of the aircraft back onto Earth, where the poor townsfolk of Gunnison, Colorado are waiting around for something more interesting to happen to them other than their high school love triangles and failed deer hunts.

Meanwhile on the Predator planet, we see some CCTV footage exposing the failure of the crashed ship to a presumably senior ranked Predator. This Predator supervisor, two weeks to promotion, puts on some gear Rambo-style and flies solo to check out the crash site before his boss finds out. Too late - the facehuggers (larvae of the xenomorph) are already having fun with the locals, not to mention that the Predalien is all out to visit some nasty violence on women especially. Then, we hang on for about an hour or so to see if the Predator supervisor manages to clear up his staff's cock-ups, while being entertained with some token character development of the locals.

Is it better than the first? Yes and no. Sci-fi fans of the original have been reported to dismiss this one as a "Transformers" misadventure with messy, 'cheating' fight sequences, although there are one or two surprises in store for the humans. The action in "AVP2" is admittedly exciting, even if it's plain silly that the Predators look so helpless sometimes and get jumped quite easily by the Aliens despite being so much more intelligent and having so many sophisticated gadgets.

The biggest complaint one can foresee is its ridiculous anti-climax, which even comes with a don't-trust-the-government message thrown in for good measure. "AVP2" is milking the two franchises well but it's also ruining fanboy expectations of each. The once-awesome Aliens we learned to fear through Ripley have been reduced from demonic, impossible-to-kill serpents to pest-like, "Jurassic Park" raptors that die like flies. Not to be outdone, the Predators are looking stupider than ever since 'Scar' last teamed up with the chick in "AVP" and needed to sweat when taking care of a couple of teenagers, never mind fighting Aliens proper. Maybe the Predators need to undo their dreadlocks because its just not fun watching them behaving like they need their head examined.

Whoever wins, we lose indeed. It's time to dig up that old "The Thing" DVD or wait until "AVP2" gets a HBO slot.

Cinema Online, 23 September 2008