Battleship

Hollywood seems to be running out of ideas. With more sequels/prequels/why-have-they-made-another-quels about to hit our screens this summer, it would appear that screenwriters' block has well and truly hit the big studios. But never fear, Hollywood has hit upon an almost limitless creative source for inspiration: board games. Battleship is based on the turn-based board game of the same name (hard to believe, I know) and sees the likes of Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson and Rihanna run around warships and make things explode in the name of saving the Earth from an alien invasion. Whatever next – Scrabble: The Movie?

When an international flotilla of warships encounters an alien spacecraft just off the Hawaiian coast, it falls to Alex Hopper (played by Taylor Kitsch, last seen in the flop that was John Carter) to defeat the alien race and ensure the survival of the fleet. Now, the first thing to say about Battleship is that it's all over the place. The pacing is diabolically bad, with the director Peter Berg seeming to only know gears 1 and 5, favouring block gear changes from slow, cliché-ridden dialogue to all out explosive action sequences in the blink of an eye. The overall effect of this uneven narrative is, to say the least, grating. One minute, we're trundling through one-liners such as “They ain't sinking this battleship” and the next, warships are being blown up with artillery meant to look like those little yellow tack things you'd use in the real game, helicopters are being ripped to shreds by angry yo-yos and alien spaceships are busting their moves on Hawaii's surf. Now, whilst submerged in the aural wall of ear-splitting explosions which accompanied these action sequences, I have to say that they did become quite fun. For about ten minutes. At over two hours long, the film could easily have been half an hour shorter and even then the action sequences would have lost their effect.

Watching Rihanna prance around a Destroyer armed with a MP5 submachine gun has to be one of the strangest cinema experiences I've had recently as I really don't understand why on earth she was in the film. Sure, her performance was adequate and her name on the posters will bring in a few more million for the studio but her character seemed incidental and almost like an afterthought: the world would still have been saved had she stuck to running around fields with not much on. Liam Neeson as the Admiral of the fleet gave his usual performance – Liam Neeson as Liam Neeson – and Brooklyn Decker as Hopper's love interest did little to make the threat from the aliens seem alarming. But maybe I'm being harsh – even the finest actors would have struggled to make the dialogue engaging.

Berg has followed in the directorial style of Michael Bay: that is to say, BANG, CRASH, BOOM, WALLOP, SMASH, but the special effects are pretty spectacular and it's refreshing that the film hasn't been released in 3D (if you want sinking ships in three dimensions, head over to Screen 2 showing Titanic). Shots of all kinds of military hardware being deployed, blown up and sunk were quite entertaining but, again, it was a case of too much of a good thing. The sheer madness of the battle sequences and the laughably-awful dialogue almost made the film seem self-conscious and aware of its own silliness. In the end, however, slow-motion shots of geriatric war veterans going to battle stations on a decommissioned battleship were just too much. I'd like to say that Battleship sank but, in reality, it never even floated. 

Clapperboard Rating: * *