A good concept - get Shane Black to have a shot at the franchise - and a colourful cast suffers under the weight of too many plots and too much exposition. They could have started the film like Escape from New York with a bunch of prisoners being transported, then detoured to meet Olivia Munn. That means the film could have focused on its main strength - the by play of the characters on the bus.
(The irony of this being the original script was much longer and coherent).
I wish Arnie had come back to star in it - surely he'd be free now? Boyd Holbrook starts off fine but I'm not sure he's a star. (At the least he's miscast as a "seen it all" experienced sniper solder.) He becomes more annoying as the film goes on, as does the film.
There's a lot of sacrifice from the gang but because we haven't spent that much time with them it doesn't mean as much when they die heroically (I gather this wasn't an issue in the original script). But I lost track of who was who.
The story gets dumber and also more confusing as it goes along with good predators, cloning, powerful autistic kids and so on. Expanding the lore is fine but I got confused and the Marvelesque setting up sequels etc is just draining. I wish studios would stop trying to be Marvel. By the time of that final coda scene I wanted to yell at the screen - "stop just stop I don't want to see this film any more or any more like it".
There's some Black tropes in there - buddy comedy between Thomas Jane and Keegan-Michael Key, a small kid who witnesses a lot of action (eg Nice Guys, Last Boy Scout). He just should've done Assault on Precinct 13 with the Predator, or made it a buddy detective film with the Predator.
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