BATTLESHIP is one hell of a giant turkey, but at least it has some negative energy towards itself, constantly poking fun at its ludicrous origin and flat script when not unfortunately trying to be ultra-serious and "Bay-tastic" for the studio heads fitting its bill. This is a film created to franchise a board game, which anyone who has played one knows that fun often is it be had and relationships are to be strained. After embarking with the film, BATTLESHIP ends up being the sore loser, kicking and screaming about the amounts of misses it has than hitting its targets.
The film revolves around a frozen chicken burrito. No, I'm not making this up, the film focuses heavily around a Mexican meal in its opening moments. We are introduced to our gloomily and dirty loser protagonist Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), who goes out of his way to obtain a burrito for a supermodel (Brooklyn Decker) who just so happens to walk into a bar. Surely, she is to be his girlfriend, especially once he illegally gets one for her before being justifiably tasered to the ground. Anyway, the douchebag Hopper is then forced by his more officer and a gentleman brother Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard) to join the Navy damnit, because we need to move this plot forward after wasting ten minutes. Bam! Title card comes up. This is one of the worst ways to start off a so-called action blockbuster, by having your hero trying to get a home run through refried beans.
Cut to years later at the RIMPAC naval exercises in Hawaii, where the two brothers now have command over separate destroyer ships. Alex still retains his rash attitude, getting into a fight with a Japanese captain and possibly getting his jack-ass kicked out of the service. Now how can he ask the father of his hot girlfriend for her hand in marriage, especially since the father is coincidentally his head Admiral (Liam Neeson)? Meanwhile and elsewhere in Hawaii, some scientists have long been trying to send out communication signals to a distant planet that is suitable to match with Earth's own atmosphere. Some evil conquering aliens get the signal and send out five ships to Earth to lock off Hawaii with an energy dome, do some recon and pointless destruction before sending a return signal back to order the rest to come for world domination. So human's fate rests entirely on a pathetic and incompetent destroyer commander and his more deserving and likable crew.
Take note that the heroes largely do battle with a destroyer in a movie called BATTLESHIP. Sure, a battleship does come into play later to great results and the destroyer is one of the five legendary game pieces of the Hasbro board game but it is so stupid that screenwriters Jon and Eric Hoeber failed to do anything with the obvious in favor for the generic. Not only is a battleship not the main vessel, but the immortal line "You sunk my battleship!" is never uttered at all, despite the line being more part of America's pop culture than this film will ever be. Why does the viewer have to sit through INDEPENDENCE DAY/TOP GUN fan fiction when they clearly came for big warships in a suspenseful scenario, looking for their opponents inch by inch before completely annihilating them, all in glorious CGI flare? No one will care about Decker's situation behind enemy lines, or the goofy fish aliens with odd Shaggy goatees. They are just wondering when the ships will finally do battle.
When the ships do engage with the weird frog-hopping alien ships, the naval fights are certainly a lot of cheesy fun. Also, thankfully, there is a brief sequence where the familiar grid-based combat of the board game comes into play, hushed behind big words like "water displacement" and ominous music cues because this is a serious movie. But it is those tongue-in-cheek moments that ultimately work. Director Peter Berg is clearly trying to save this film from sinking under write-offs and critical vile, simply by pointing at the film's flimsy construction whenever he can. For example, as expected, there are some head-bashing propaganda scenes where old Navy veterans are to be celebrated, which they should be but not under tedious and money-grubbing circumstances. Berg turns this all around by not only featuring them later on, but giving them hilarious lines and little moments that are to be remembered for. He also gets the main and supporting actors to play up their individual emotions and camaraderie amongst themselves for an exquisite campy taste.
When it comes to the acting side, you can properly tell which characters I had problems with. Taylor Kitsch is talented but is unfortunately suffering the Ryan Reynolds treatment this year by headlining bad mega-pictures. Here, he is just too good in making the character as awful as he truly is. It takes a long while for Alex Hopper to finally be a little more tolerable in the picture. His fellow destroyer commanders are more suited and better protagonists, except Skarsgard is specially designed to be expendable and the Japanese Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) is instantly rejected due to unguided studio fears. Both Skarsgard and Asano actually do really well in the roles, handling their officer responsibilities first and foremost when not cracking a nice joke. This same thing happens on the female side, with Brooklyn Decker doing nothing beyond looking pretty and jiggling her boobs. Compare her to Rihanna, who goes beyond the stigma of being a pop music star in a feature film to playing a brave, bad-ass gunner's mate who saves lives and blow things up with the press of a trigger.
BATTLESHIP is only suited for afternoon affairs, whether with cheap matinee theater tickets or as a rental. All of the generous humor and thrills is just way too bogged down by first draft crap and studio notes. Much of the public is walking into this with low expectations and unbridled hatred, utterly angry at its existence and it being a complete visual duplicate of the TRANSFORMERS films. Universal Studios will surely learn the hard way that people do tend to learn from their mistakes and choose better blockbusters, like the now extremely profitable THE AVENGERS, which can handle action and comedy with ease.
FINAL REVIEW: 2 / 5
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