Review: Battleship (UK Cert 12A)

First off, I love blockbusters.

I even love them when you disengage your brain, you eat your popcorn and you don't care ridiculous the script is, how stupid the woman role is, how OTT macho the lead men are and even when the explosion soundtrack makes my ears bleed. BUT! This film is just beyond belief – it's all the above and still you can't forgive it and say ‘oh well, it’s a blockbuster, it’s not Shakespeare!’

So, let's begin this warning… yes, this is not a review – this is a WARNING! I'm warning you and also saving you all from wasting two of your life! From the get go, this film is awful! Not ‘it’s that bad, it’s good’, not a ‘guilty pleasure’ – just an abomination on the cinema landscape.

The film is based on the board game of the same name. Yes, it’s based on a board game, which is now owned by Hasbro. Some bright spark at Hasbro decided their next venture into film after the success of Transformers would be… a board game! Come on! Barbie The Movie would have been a better idea – and me saying I would prefer to watch Barbie The Movie screams how bad this film is! Now, you can make a successful film based on a board game – a case in point is Clue (based on Cluedo) but then again Dungeons & Dragons is the yin to that yang! But I digress.

So, the premise: the annual get together of all the Navies of the world – a military expo- is happening and we meet character upon character of annoying cliché drivel. Very near by, there’s a space signal monitoring station where, it just so happens, a few years previous a message was sent out to a newly found planet which is likely to be a close resemblance to Earth! Aliens invade, trap three battleships in a massive force field and a battle commences – you see, the Aliens need the communication dishes that are conveniently near by, because their communication ship crashlanded in Hong Kong, killing twenty thousand people! Yeah.

This movie has a terrible plot, the dialogue might as well be written on the back of a playing card and the cast are just the worst actors on Earth – oh, and on top of that, the lead of this film has had not one but two massive flops this year: Taylor Kitsch (who also starred in Disney's John Carter). We even have Rihanna in this film and you know a film is pants when a pop singer turns up (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome anyone?) Not even Liam Neeson can save this film; his role is blatantly there so his name can be on the poster and Liam Neeson on the poster gets us him playing the Admiral who, for the entire movie, is on the other side of the forcefield, unable to do anything which makes his payday easy (as he literally does nothing in this movie!)

The worst moment of this film however is a scene where there trying to be all Das Boot and use low lighting, have the characters in a 'silent running' mode of combat, all looking at one another with tense (yawn inducing) close ups! But what do they do? Well, you see, because of the forcefield and Alien tech that surrounds them, all radar is not working and they can’t lock on without co-ordinates. So they devise a plan- thanks to a Captain of a Japanese vessel (don't ask!), they’ve been using a clever tracking system. They bring up all the buoys in the area then overlay with a map- thus creating a grid. With this grid, they can lock on to a target. So we see characters all tense-looking as they lock onto A4 and FIRE… then we wait to see if it’s a MISS or a HIT! Yes, they actually try to make playing Battleship tense and dramatic!

The film.... no, I refuse to call it a film… The giant advert has no redeeming features in any form and should under no circumstances be watched.

I will give it..... 0.00000000000000000000001 out of 5

Rhys