We are introduced to a large number of human protagonists, including ex-con Dallas (Pasquale), his pizza-delivering brother Ricky (Lewis), returning servicewoman Kelly (Aylesworth) and local hottie Jesse (Hager). None of them are even remotely interesting; though there's the first stirrings of romantic entanglement between the hottie and the pizza guy, with a hateful local bully as complication. You won't care. The only real chemistry is between Dallas and local lawman Eddie (John Ortiz), who remembers him before he got in trouble and wants to be his friend again. You won't care about that either.

The aliens come to town, one of them a hybrid bearing some physical attributes of the Predator it incubated inside, in the last movie. (Nothing is really made of this; his mouth opens a different way, and he has the Predator dreadlocks, so you'll know which one he is, on those rare occasions when he's filmed with sufficient visual clarity to allow the distinction, but that's about it. You won't care.) A sole Predator travels to Earth to battle the infestation, making him the closest thing the story has to a protagonist, even if he has no trouble slaughtering human beings who get in his way. You won't care. He makes his kind's trademark tk-tk-tk-tk-tk sound a lot, sometimes for minutes on end, as he follows the spoor of the Aliens. This is unfortunate, since you can't understand a word of it and the same time could have been spent giving you a little more of substance from the human beings you're supposed to care about. As it is, the guy might be reciting Shakespeare, or he might have a sesame seed stuck in his teeth.

Almost all the action takes place in darkness, whether because of a city-wide blackout or because of the torrential rain that soon makes the human-types as wet and shiny as the rubber monsters. There's a lot of one shiny, shadowy monster banging into another shiny, shadowy monster while thudding music pretends that any of this has any visceral or emotional impact at all. You think of Ridley Scott, of James Cameron, of Sigourney Weaver in a life pod and of Arnold Shwarzenegger in a jungle, you watch the human cannon-fodder scream and die and inevitably get their hands on military hardware, and you realize that the entire enterprise left the realm of diminishing returns before the first frame of this appalling waste of film was shot.

No longer the thing you once loved

The sum total of this movie's effect on its audience never once rises above "none," even at its bloodiest moments. When a doting father and his cute young son are the first humans to fall to the face-huggers? There's no reason to care. When homeless people, deputies and sympathetic waitresses go next? No impact whatsoever. When the aliens enter a maternity ward filled with crying babies? Ho-hum. How about when a pregnant woman in labor finds herself assaulted by an Alien who pumps egg after egg down her throat, while her fellow imminent mommies in the adjoining beds scream with horror? You might find this pretty damn hard to believe, but the movie even blows THAT.

Let's underline that last point. It takes a special kind of determined, cosmic non-talent to rob threats to babies and pregnant women of potential impact. After all, we're human beings, and even the most desensitized among us are hardwired to react to such stimuli. We're so resistant toward moviemakers who abuse such elements for cheap shock that it's pretty damned difficult to find even the most shameless hacks willing to incur what the slightest misstep would turn to backlash and resentment. But the makers of this thing have managed the impossible feat of making violence to kids and pregnant women not just ineffective or dull, but downright banal. For any given audience member predisposed to find those scenes scary or cool or exciting or gross or repugnant or even hateful—in short, any possible reaction along the broad spectrum of possible responses to horrific movie moments—Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem manages instead to accomplish the one response that indicates total failure, which is say dull curiosity over just how much more of this dismal crap has to be sat through.

And if you think that's an exaggeration, please be apprised: There were 70 people at the matinee caught by this reviewer, a group that included kids, teenagers and eager fans. There were no screams, no laughs, no cheers. Nobody made a peep. Compare that to how people cheered when Schwarzenegger beat the first Predator, or when Ellen Ripley said, "Get away from her, you bitch!", and you'll realize that any appeal the concept might have had has been trapped in amber.

Chances are that you'll be worse than bored. You'll find fodder for anger. You realize that this is a movie made without a fraction of the inventiveness that distinguished at least one and (though not a Predator fan, I'll concede the point) possibly two of the movie series that spawned it, a movie that will no doubt earn back its cost many times over as fans drawn by the cross-pollination of its two popular brands ignore the several quality (if non-genre) films available at the same multiplexes and file in like lab rats capable of being drawn by buzzers that indicate the delivery of fresh food pellets. It's a movie that doesn't bother to add so much as a single interesting idea to any of the movies that came before it, that runs the once-considerable appeal of both titular menaces into the ground, and thus cheapens the impact they once had, to the point of sullying the treasured originals. It's a movie that spends so much time cloaking itself and its monsters in darkness, shadow and torrential rainfall, rapid-cutting all the action to the point that it's often unclear just which species is being shown at any given moment, that the intent is transparently not providing spooky atmosphere, so much as obscuring the production's shortcomings behind murky protective camouflage. It's a movie that illustrates the end-result of the aesthetic bankruptcy that places marketing over good stories, good scripts and quality subject matter. It's a movie that cares less about providing a memorable experience than it does about gulling the unwary with a title capable of luring asses into seats.

Congratulations, those of you who bought tickets. You've been had. Are you proud?