The Predator's fundamental issue is that Shane Black is not a horror director. They just had the wrong guy on the job, Shane Black is more at home when he was doing Iron man 3 than The Predator and it shows. Shane Black is not a bad writer and director but he was not the guy to helm a Predator movie.
The Predator is also crippled in the editing bay which is also a good chunk of why this film had the profitability problems it did. You also have to consider that they also had a script which was butchered following the test-screenings and ass hats who leaked it. These all being problems you need sorting out in pre-production and or earlier, not after the money has already been spent. Predators are costly creature FX and they had like four of these things, two of which they now had problems marketing. They also had a whole group of mutants that they could also do nothing with though unlike the Emissary it's unclear if they actually spent money on making them.
Anderson I don't doubt knows the material but AVP was and is a versus story. You don't go to these things for drama, you go to shit like this because you wanna see guys in rubber monster suits fight. Nobody watches Freddy versus Jason, Alien Versus Predator, or like any Godzilla movie because we care about what the Humans are doing. If the Human element is great then that's awesome, but all AVP had to do was sell us on the fight and it did. AVP isn't a good movie but it succeeded at all it really needed to do.
