Predators

Skippable, and the best of the three films between the original and Prey, which is a lower bar than it sounds but worth noting.

The premise is the strongest idea any sequel had. Eight people wake in freefall with no memory of how they got there, land in a jungle, and work out two things in sequence: they are not on Earth, and every one of them is a killer of some kind. A cartel enforcer, a death row inmate, a sniper, a Yakuza. They have been selected and released onto a game preserve, which inverts the original neatly, where the soldiers were hunted by accident rather than by design.

Nimród Antal directs it as a straight survival picture with Robert Rodriguez producing from a script he had been carrying since the nineties, and the first hour of discovery is genuinely good. Adrien Brody as the lead was the controversial choice and he is better than the complaints suggested, playing a man whose only skill is calculating who to sacrifice.

It falls apart in the back half. A long detour with a marooned survivor stops the film dead, the internal hierarchy of different Predator types is explained rather than shown, and the climax is a straightforward fight. Nothing requires it, and nothing later builds on it.