Battleship Review

Director: Peter Berg

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna, Alexander Skarsgård, Brooklyn Decker, and Liam Neeson

Running time: 131 Minutes

Certificate: 12A

Synopsis: In the Hawaiian Islands, an international naval fleet at Pearl Harbor engages in a dynamic and intense battle against an alien species.

Lets get this out of the way – BATTLESHIP is awful! Awful to the point that its occasionally funny, but you know for a fact that the filmmakers never meant it to be seen in that way. Based loosely on the popular Hasbro board game, the film is a perfect example of how desperate Hollywood execs are starting to become when it comes to creating new film franchises that will keep their wallets full of cash. The film’s bare basic, bargain-bin plot is stretched to breaking point over the course of its two and a bit hour running time, whilst there’s enough plot holes to sink a battleship (sorry, had to be done). The film’s uneven tone veers awkwardly from comedy to mass genocide and back again in the blink of an eye, whilst the blatant attempts at highlighting US patriotism it presents are both pathetic and laughable. And most annoyingly of all, the soundtrack is horribly intrusive. Seriously, you’ll be trying to rip your own ears off!

But hey, there’s a good cast keeping this thing afloat, right?  Well, Taylor Kitsch may be a more likeable lead here then he was in JOHN CARTER, but he still comes across as the real life equivalent of Plank from ED, EDD, AND EDDY. Elsewhere Liam Neeson looks embarrassed in the few scenes he appears in, whilst Rihanna…well, she just stands there! Lets not beat around the bush, she serves absolutely no purpose in being in this film, or any for that matter.  Her casting is merely a way of getting more bums on seats – surely a sign that the film’s producers lacked faith in their own film!  Stick to the day job, Rihanna – unless your day job is now acting, in which case, give up the day job and go back to dancing half-naked in fetishized music videos.

OK, so I’ll concede that the film is occasionally fun – in the same kind of way PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE is fun to watch for the sake of seeing how crap it is. The occasional gags and in-jokes are fun to spot, whilst the over the top action hero lines our heroes spout are cringingly funny. The CGI effects are nothing special but still a darn sight better then those we see in other summer blockbusters, and the action sequences keep the film moving along at a fair pace. But these points aside, the film is an absolute embarrassment  – its corny, both its protagonists and antagonists are hugely under-explored, it’s largely driven by SFX as opposed to story, it defies logic about nine times a minute, and worst of all it’s a tonally all over the place. Basically, it’s a mess!

A better way to spend 2 hours of your life?  Just go out and buy the Hasbro Battleships board game. I guarantee you’ll be able to come up with more fun and engaging story yourself!

   BATTLESHIP is released in UK cinemas 11th April