"Battleship" Review

I wonder who at Universal thought, "That board game with the little boats and the red and white pegs... I smell a Hollywood hit!"

Milton Bradley's Battleship game has been a staple of family game night for generations. In 2012, Hollywood decided it might be a neat idea to update the classic game for today's moviegoers by ramping up the spectacle and working in some semblance of a plot. In other words, they tried to make a board game into the biggest blockbuster of the summer.

That's problem number one, and probably the biggest mistake Battleship makes. It shouldn't have even been made. When screenwriters lack so much creativity that they turn to children's games for source material, it might be time to look for a new day job. But God forbid if it doesn't make a pile of cash as big as the sea vessels themselves. IMDb reports roughly $303 million grossed worldwide during the film's theatrical run, outperforming the budget by about $91 million, which means Battleship, the board game movie, my friends, is a hit. Now I hear talk of more properties being snatched up along with my childhood to be made into popcorn fare. Candy Land and Monopoly are both in the works.

Needless to say, I was not a fan of Battleship, and after watching it, I felt as puzzled as I probably would've playing the game anyway. Maybe that was the point, but the movie follows a Naval officer (Taylor Kitsch), his crew (Rihanna (making her celluloid debut), John Tui, Tadanobu Asano), and a fleet of ships as they attempt to discover and thwart the destructive goals of an alien armada (IMDb).
What puzzles me is that the film is actually really good for the first twenty or thirty minutes. It lays the foundation for what could've been a riveting story of human intrigue chronicling Lieutenant Hopper's (Kitsch) rocky relationship with his Commander brother (Alexander Skarsgard) and his courtship of Sam (the always striking Brooklyn Decker), the daughter of the boys' commanding officer Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson).
The first ten minutes feature my favorite scene with Hopper meeting Sam for the first time. He's drunk, and she doesn't want anything to do with him, but what she does want is a chicken burrito. The ensuing moment might actually be one of the funniest of any movie I've seen all year with a bumbling Hopper breaking into a gas station to get the burrito. It's set to the theme music of The Pink Panther and is presented as security camera footage. If you bring yourself to see Battleship, you'll enjoy that scene at the very least.

Then things get crappy when the aliens come to town, both for the characters and for the audience. Writers Jon and Erich Hoeber take that promising human story from the first twenty minutes and throw it overboard in favor of shiny special effects. All the intrigue of the opening moments is gone once the real action starts. That's how you know it's bad. A decent movie would maintain my belief in the characters and keep me invested on some emotional level as the action plays out. Battleship could've done that but doesn't. Once the aliens hit, I lost all sense of feeling for the characters. I often found myself twiddling my thumbs waiting for Brooklyn Decker to come onscreen again. She's not even a good actress, she just looks that good. No shiny alien spaceships or fiery explosions for me! Just show me Brooklyn!

Overall, poor writing is the most gaping hole in this Battleship's hull. Peter Berg's direction is actually fairly solid, as it's been with just about all his other work (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, Hancock). He does the best he can with what he's given, as do the actors. Everyone's performance is as good as acting needs to be for a board game movie. It's just cookie-cutter crap with occasional cheesy nods to the game. Lines such as "So they can't see us, and we can't see them?" and "They're not sinkin' this battleship!" had me shaking my head.

It's a lot to take in, and I could rant all day, but instead I'll just leave you with this thought: All three Transformers movies are better. Hope that puts it in perspective for you.

1 OF 4 STARS