BATTLESHIP

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs
 
BATTLESHIP
GRADE: D  
Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker, Alexander Skarsgard, Rihanna, and Liam Neeson
Screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Erich Hoeber
Directed by Peter Berg

Hollywood is officially out of ideas.

In 2005, NASA discovers an extrasolar planet inside the Goldilocks Zone, with conditions similar to Earth. Nearly wetting themselves with self important enthusiasm, NASA transmits a powerful signal from a communications array in Hawaii, which will be boosted by a satellite in orbit.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or in this case the bar, two brothers, Stone and Alex Hopper ,are celebrating the younger brother's birthday, when Alex (Taylor Kitsch), notices a strikingly beautiful women at the car attempting to order a chicken burrito. Unfortunately, the bar doesn't serve food this late at night. This bright but down to earth and normal, every day, real life girl next door type (played by top Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Brooklyn Decker) initially has no interest in our intrepid young hero, but when he breaks into a convenience store across the street in order to get her a burrito, causing a good deal of property damage, including a police car wreck, and is then tasered by the police as he falls at her feet handing her the much coveted microwaved grease-ball, she is so obviously touched by the fact that chivalry lives as proven by the fact that a total stranger would break the law while drunk and cause a major police incident in order to steal a $3.75 Frozen Food Item for a woman he has barely met even though she has long golden blonde hair and stunningly perfect breasts, that she is instantly smitten. It's these kind of reality based, “slice of life” moments that are synonymous with the words “in Association with Hasbro.”

There is, however, a complication. The woman is Samantha Shane, daughter of Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Shane (played by Academy Award Nominee Liam Neeson, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom) who in turn is the superior of Commander Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard), Alex's older brother. Stone is not happy: his little brother is a slacker, and a malcontent who mooches off of him and refuses to live up to his potential, and he himself is stuck with a name that sounds like a term used to describe someone going from bathroom to bathroom trying to deal with a painful kidney problem. In order to fix both situations, Stone forces his brother to join the United States Navy, reasoning that things will somehow become better if both men are in a good position to get regularly shot at, and that the movie will be even more annoying if both of them are referred to only as “Hopper.”

By 2012, Hooper #1 (Kitsch) is a Lieutenant and the Tactical Action Officer aboard the destroyer USS John Paul Jones, while Hopper # 2 (Skarsgard) is commanding officer of the USS Sampson. Hopper is also in a committed relationship with Samantha and wants to marry her, but is afraid to ask her father for permission, but Hopper insists that Hopper do so, worried that further antics from Hopper will further endanger Hopper's career (Hopper, not Hopper, though what is bad for Hopper is not exactly good for Hopper, either.).

At RIMPAC, a series of Naval excercises taking place at Pearl Harbor, Hopper brawls with Japanese officer Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano), the latest in a string of incidents that could result in his discharge at the end of RIMPAC (the first being when he and Goose buzzed the tower of an aircraft carrier, unless that was a different movie.) . Meanwhile, in a key subplot carefully designed to pad the movie out to two hours, Samantha is now working as a physical therapist with spectacularly perfect breasts, and she accompanies a retired Army veteran and amputee on a hike on Oahu to help him adapt to his prosthetic legs, the reasoning being that Decker has made a career out of making men stand on their own (rim-shot.).

But everything changes when five alien ships arrive in response to the NASA signal. One ship collides with an orbital satellite and crashes in Hong Kong, while four others land in the water near Hawaii. Sampson, John Paul Jones, and the Japan destroyer Myōkō investigate, but are trapped when one of the ships erects an impenetrable force field around the Hawaiian islands. The destroyers attempt to establish contact, but the aliens open fire: Sampson and Myōkō are destroyed, and John Paul Jones is damaged, with the commanding officers, executive officers, and Jon Bon Jovi all getting killed in the process. Lt. Hopper takes command as the most senior officer left on the ship, and they recover survivors from Myōkō, with Captain Nagata among them.

But then, unfortunately, in the second act, the movie starts to get a little silly (as opposed to before). Since the barrier prevents the use of radar and sonar (they can't see the aliens, and the aliens can't see them), Nagata reveals that they can use tsunami warning buoys around Hawaii to track the alien vessels' movements. In other words, they are looking at electronic maps and firing at numbered coordinates based on their best guess. Sound familiar? Brilliant, isn't it? And you thought this wasn't actually going to tie directly into the game, did you? Come on. Would the folks who gave us the same Transformers movie three times and put Channing Tatum into Oscar territory with G.I. JOE disappoint us? The answer is, only if you are stupid enough to have expectations. In the final third, an actual BATTLESHIP is brought in so the title of the film will work, and all is put right.

All the elements are in place for a truly terrible summer blockbuster, and director Peter Berg, who previously gave us the Will Smith travesty Hancock, is faced with the daunting task of tackling a franchise concept so stupid that Michael Bay wouldn't touch it with a 200 foot tall explosion. While Berg lacks Bay's most frenetic traits, he also lacks his sense of style, and tries to make up for them by mimicking the Pearl Harbor “bomb's eye view shot” approximately ninety times, and by making this film an amalgam of every Bay blockbuster: aliens are dropping robotic meteors that transform into buzz saws on Pearl Harbor. The only thing missing is a pair of wise cracking, black buddy cops busting Sean Connery out of Alcatraz.

The film has the distinction of featuring by far the most slapdash and nonthreatening alien invaders in decades – they look like something that wandered of the set of the early seasons of Red Dwarf. As big and bombastic as the movie is, it is apparent that Universal and Hasbro knew they did not have a Transformers sized hit on their hands and cut corners where they could.

Bad performances abound. Decker honestly manages to give a reasonable approximation of acting – she's far from good, but she's at the very least no worse than Megan Fox and certainly better than Rose Huntington Whitely, the underwear model who replaced Fox in the Transformers series. In fact, truth be told, she embarrasses herself less than Liam Neeson, who could, after all, be in a real movie and acting, if he felt like it. Singer Rihanna, as the sassy black tomboy bad ass who can fight as well as any white man, manages to make a big impression in the sense that now we understand why Chris Brown hit her. As for Taylor Kitsch, the Keanu Reeves for a new generation, he gives an adequate, if uninspired, performance, but fared much better earlier this year in John Carter, another silly, over the top sci-fi epic that had the advantage of not sucking but unfortunately managed to lose so much money that it nearly destroyed the Walt Disney Corporation to such an extent that they now are only the third richest independent nation on Earth.

But the big question you want to know is: does anyone actually say “You sunk my Battleship?” the answer is no, but they do resort to recycling the single most over used line from the Star Wars saga, so still they get no credit from me. In the end, if you really like the Michael Bay formula, and tend to get into shameless, flag waving, pro military propaganda, you may have some fun with this. But even then, don't pay full price.

Battleship is rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, and mild, badly directed sensuality.