For me, it means I can tell you what's going to happen to the plot before it unfolds. When the two love interests first meet, in almost any romantic comedy, you know that they will hook up, one of them will do something colosolly stupid (usually the male), he'll spend the rest of the movie making it up to her, she'll relent, and they walk off into the sunset together. Now, that's not predicatability - that's the trope of romantic comedies. Predictability is when you can tell exactly how he will mess up and with whom, what 3 over the top things he will do to make it up to her, what she will say when she forgives him and what the dog will be wearing at their wedding *and* you can tell all that from the moment they lock eyes in the first 15 minutes of the movie.

I appreciate directors who make it a habit of *not* doing that. Any Firefly fan will remember that they set up Simon as The Bad Guy from his first appearance in the show, but Whedon revealed later in the episode that it just wasn't so. I'm told he's done the same on other shows as well.

So, when someone else tells me it's predictable, I assume they mean I can tell you the specifics of the plot (not the trope, but the specifics) earlier in the movie than the writer/director intended. -H...