Michael Clayton and AVP: Requiem Movie Reviews

Michael Clayton was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and while I thought it was a reasonably powerful movie about the dark side of lawyers (there’s a bright side?), it was slow to get started and if you’re already familiar with the premise of the film, it could be difficult to figure out what was going on. In fact, it’s not until about halfway through the movie that you realize the nature of the class action lawsuit and why it’s causing such a big stir.

George Clooney plays pretty well the same character he always does, but it’s the powerful performance by Tom Wilkinson that makes this movie worth watching. You can tell that his character — Arthur Edens — is an absolute genius, but he’s gone off the deep end. In the end, I found the action to progress too slowly and the explanation of said action is lacking. Michael Clayton is an okay movie, but not an Oscar-worthy movie.

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem follows up on the ultra-cheesy AVP movie from 2004. Heading into this movie, I knew that I shouldn’t expect much in terms of a story and I’d be more in store for boatloads of action and some cool special effects. I was particularly looking forward to seeing the predalien hybrid. Well, I was mostly right.

The story is virtually non-existent, but the part that was seriously disappointing was the fact that the action wasn’t as monumental as it could have been. Despite being rated R, AVP:R wasn’t nearly as violent as it could have been. The camera cuts away just before the most gruesome acts, only implying that someone had been skinned, decapitated, or otherwise disemboweled.

There was no connection to the human characters — they felt like cardboard cutouts — and the action is wholly illogical (why does the Predator vaporize some victims but not others?). I couldn’t even pick out stunt actor Leo Chiang from the crowd. The only saving grace for this film is that it has freaking Predator. And that’s kind of cool.