Michael Bay is the Spielberg of crap. and this loud, brainless Mountain Dew commercial with a narrative is his masterwork.

The plot of this wasteful, culture-killer is simple, a big rock is going to crush Earth so in response, America sends up Bruce Willis to blow it up with nuclear bombs because...well, just because it sounds awesome, that's why.

It isn’t that the film is stupid, of course its stupid - it a film starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck directed by Michael Bay and written by JJ Abrams, it has stupid in its DNA. The fact that this is dumb doesn't mean much. The number of truly brain dead movies is legion. This movie is a momentous achievement because of the its ability to sustain its stupidity for the duration of its run time and does so at an extreme level. From the moment the lights dim to the second the credits thankfully begin to roll, the audience is assaulted with an unyielding dumb, a thought-smothering blanket of idiocy so thick that it can cover any struggle for logic. Michael Bay has managed to develop a redefinition of the moronic. From the plot to the dialog, every aspect of the script manages to avoid any not being completely dunderheaded.

Here is the kicker, despite the idiocy of every frame, this is a fun movie. It asks nothing from the audience but gives a lot of flashy lights and numerous moments of peril in return. The reason the film works is thanks to the two-dimensional character writing skills of JJ Abrams. He pens a gaggle of impressively thin characters and then Bay cast these shells with solid character actors to bring them to half-life. There's the cranky blue-collar dad (Willis), the virginal princess daugter (Liv Tyler), her handsome young buck (Ben Affleck), the down-to-earth sidekick (Will Patton), the frenzied genius (Steve Buschemi) and let's not forget, the black friend (Michael Clarke Duncan), tossed in for good measure. Across the board, the cast is given an easy job, play to the low expectations and recite some snappy lines that really make no sense, even in context. Its a heck of a living these people make.

I could keep going on make unspecfic attacks on the film but I think I've made my opinion clear. Allow me to sum this up and we'll all move our separate ways. To sum this up, it has Ben Affleck in it and it suits his skills.



Related Reviews:
Bruce Willis movies
Hudson Hawk (1991)
Live Free or Die Hard (2007)


Other Critic's Reviews:
Bad Movie Night
Independent Critics

Labels: Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Michael Bay, Owen Wilson, Steve Busemi, Will Patton