Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson
When I first heard of the movie Battleship, I laughed uncontrollably. First of all, Hollywood is so desperate for money that they’re trying to turn a board game into a film. Second, the film's got plenty of potential to have some terrible acting from a cast that includes the likes of Rihanna and Brooklyn Decker. Finally, the awful trailers made it clear to me that Battleship would be a Transformerswannabe. With all this in mind, the movie is fodder for a wasted rating. I thought I was going to need some shots during Battleship. It turns out I just needed a few cocktails.
Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is a loser. At the age of 26, he's disappointed his brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) time and time again. Stone reaches his saturation point when Alex breaks into a convenience store to get a chicken burrito and impress Samantha Shane (Brooklyn Decker), some girl at a bar. After this, Stone decides Alex will join the Navy. Sometime later, Alex and Stone are at the RIMPAC 2012 naval exercises in Hawaii, and Alex is in a long-term relationship with Samantha. Somehow Alex manages to screw up some more. He gets into a fight with Japanese Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) and will be kicked out of the Navy after RIMPAC. He also fails to ask Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson) for his daughter's hand in marriage. Meanwhile, NASA has been transmitting a powerful communication signal into space at another Earth-like planet. They finally get a reply during the RIMPAC exercises, and the Navy has some hostile aliens on its hands.
In Battleship, the name of the game is bad acting . While I expected some bad performances and got one from Rihanna, I got a far more terrible performance from Brooklyn Decker. She may be one of the most beautiful women in the world, but she does not belong anywhere near a camera in a speaking role. I completely understand that director Peter Berg cast Decker as the hot chick of the film, but her performance is ridiculous. Whether she's acting terrified of some aliens or trying to bring a little romance to the film, she fails miserably. Decker's character is annoying as hell throughout the flick, and I secretly hoped an alien would shoot her. I've honestly seen better acting at school plays.
The other big issue with Battleship is the writing. Screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber really drop the ball here. The first half of the film is completely choppy. We abruptly go from Taylor Kitsch's Alex and his personal problems to all-out naval warfare in a matter of two or three minutes. There's very little humor that actually works throughout the film; they just write a bunch of stale jokes that fall flat with viewers. To top things off, they love to have their characters act like damn fools. Whether Brooklyn Decker's Sam is going to "go see some aliens" with Army vet Mick Canales (Gregory Gadson) or Rihanna's Cora Raikes is talking about how she always knew "they" would come, these screenwriters just like to write complete idiots into the film. This irks the hell out of me throughout the movie.
Make no mistake about it. Battleship is a bad movie. It's just not as bad as I expected it to be. It's just as bad as Revenge of the Fallen or Dark of the Moon. It is a pretty awful movie, but it has some sick action sequences that save it from the dreaded wasted rating. If I wasn't sitting there engaged in some tense naval warfare at its finest, the bad acting, crappy writing, and incessant cheesy plugs for the US Navy in this alien movie would get to me a little more. Battleship gets a 0.09% rating. Grab a few Blue Hawaii cocktails for this one.
