Predator is one of the master class in building up the suspense. You get one after math that we have no first-hand witness to (Hoppers team). Then you get the voyeuristic POV shots. Billy getting spooked by something he can't see. Then, BAM, Hawkin's death. It's mostly left to the imagination because it is the first time one of our heroes is coming up against the Predator. You build UP the suspense, not down. A splash of blood for Anna, a violent scream, and a spectre dragging Hawkins' body off into the jungle. That's all you want or need for the first kill.
Now, for Predator 2. The general idea is that, yes, you're supposed to be getting the information from Harrigan's POV. All he's seeing are massacres-in-the-aftermath. The problem is the film wants to try and go both ways, having the slaughters happen on screen, but not showing too much. Most of the slaughter doesn't really serve a purpose beyond pure indulgence in the carnage. The other big problem is that 90% of the kills are neither main or supporting characters.
The prevailing wisdom is, it's a sequel. So we need to be bigger and have more. More Predator gadgets, more guns, more violence, explosions, gore, and a bigger body count. On the other side of that is the writers going... Okay, it's set in the city, our best "soldier" analogue here is going to be street cops, SWAT teams, and FBI agents.... We'll make it like a COP film, like a murder mystery! Yeah!
Those two things meet, and the result is something that ends up deluding both sides of the equation. You're not getting pay offs in totality, and you're not really giving the main character any kind of working mystery. We already know what's going on before Harrigan even shows his face. Part of the problem is the way the narrative is framed in the film.
I've always wanted to try, as an editing exercise, trying to remove all of the Predator stuff in the opening battle. Cutting it more like a conventional Die Hard-style action sequence where we simply watch Mike taking out the bad guys, then they see some kind of an explosion, go up to investigate the slaughter, and the first time we even get a nod that the Predator is actually around is when Mike sees it cloaked on the roof.
I think the strongest section of the film is in the wake of the subway slaughter when Mike is basically chasing the Predator from the subway to the slaughter-house to the Predator ship, because the plot, character, and audience are now all in sync with each other.
