Viewed in
2013
Formats
HDTV
Premise
"Based" on the game/toy.
Liked
Rihanna.
Hated
Pretty much everything else.
Thoughts
Well, that was a boring turd.
Best part was Rihanna. She was pretty much the only human who had some charm and knew how to play in a loud, bloated action flick. The only only cast member worth mentioning was Brooklyn Decker definitely succeeding in the eye candy department. Visually, I appreciated the top notch CGI, especially during in terms of water battles and general building destruction. Lastly, there was one good joke. After being bombarded with another dude's action-movie one-liners, the character quips, "who talks like that?"
The rest of the cast was forgettable, which wasn't a shock. What really frustrated me was that Liam Neeson was in it for like 10 minutes, where he spent that time giving speeches, then sitting on the sidelines in the battle for humanity. The first forty minutes were completely superfluous "character scenes", that tried to give us emotional investment into the brothers. But it was so uninteresting I just wanted those scenes to make way for the computer graphics.
Going in, I braced myself for lazy writing. But when the story feels like a Independence Day ripoff, you know you're in really bad territory. Not that I'm a Battleship-purist, but having to sit through 150 minutes for only one scene that kinda looked like the game was pretty lame. Instead, this movie felt like a fellow Hasbro flick, with giant CGI robots wrecking havoc, and using the same same composer and sound effects as the Michael Bay Transformers franchise.
Lastly, there was a super-cheesy scene when retired Navy soldiers pitch in to help our heroes. Arguably one of the most ridiculously laughable and infuriatingly insulting scenes of 2012.
I was bracing for bad in Battleship, but not this bad, with Rihanna as the only beacon of hope in this lumbering, nonsensical slop. I liked it better when it was called Transformers.
