Battleship
DIRECTED BY PETER BERG
When execs at Universal Pictures—presumably frothing with envy at the box office takings of Paramount’s abysmal Transformers films—inked a deal with Hasbro to bring the board game Battleship to the big screen, “so-bad-it’s-good” was the best we could have hoped for. Regrettably, the resulting two-and-a-quater-hour abomination, from director Peter Berg, falls significantly short of even those rock-bottom expectations. There’s car crash entertainment, and then there’s Battleship, which simply evokes the uncomfortable sensation of enduring an actual freeway pile-up. “Louder,” it seems, was Berg’s only instruction that wasn’t “action” or “cut.” Battleship, as a result, is often a physically assaulting experience.
All other cues are cribbed shamelessly from Michael Bay’s massively profitable armed-forces-vs-aliens playbook, down to plenty of Transformers-inspired production design and a surfeit of digital pyrotechnics. The conceit by which the blind-fire board game becomes an unofficial sequel to Bay’s trilogy is that hostile extraterrestrials have erected an impenetrable perimeter in the Pacific Ocean, within which humans and aliens are invisible to one another’s sonar. This gives rise to a brief, obligatory scene of grid-based guesswork, surrounded by a bloated, utterly joyless exercise in jingoistic bombast, with a dour, one-liner-spouting Rihanna along for the ride.
Albeit belatedly, even Universal appears to have realized that adapting Hasbro’s third-tier properties is a terrible idea. In February, the studio reportedly paid a multi-million dollar penalty to escape contracts for films based on Ouija, Stretch Armstrong, and Candy Land. It’s just a pity that Battleship was, by that stage, too near launch to be similarly scuppered.