On the couch

I have a process for writing this nonsense you know. Typically after watching a film I’ll go to bed and try to reconstruct what happened in my head – it helps me work out whether the plot makes sense or not and what parts of a flick really stuck with me. So imagine my poor grey matter’s shock when it tried to reconstruct Battleship.
Also known (by me anyway) as Transformers-on-Sea, Battleship is based on the board game of the same name and proof that the last person in Hollywood capable of independent, imaginative thought was taken down a back alley somewhere just off Ventura Boulevard and shot in the back of the head about 18-months ago.
The light of creativity well and truly snuffed out, the money machine cast its Sauron-like eye around the world and happened upon board games as the next great frontier for exploitation by studios greedy for blockbusters and the beaucoup dollars the summertime tie-ins they bring in.
So in advance of David Fincher reimagining Monopoly as an analogy for the world economic crisis and the Wachowskis giving the bullet-time treatment to Hungry, Hungry Hippos, let’s deal with the problem at hand.
Battleship (ToS) stars Taylor “How could I get it so wrong, so regularly?” Kitsch as Alex Hopper, a young fella whose talents and intelligence exceed his ability to not act like a jackass. Press-ganged into the Navy after his older (wiser, more disciplined, taller) brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) gets sick of him acting the maggot all the time, Hopper is one set of war games away from being kicked out of the service. His immanent expulsion is a complicating factor in his plan to ask Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson – yes, that Liam Neeson) if he can marry his daughter, Samantha (Brooklyn Decker).
Fortunately for the young reprobate a shower of aliens answering an intergalactic “hello” sent by a SETI-like organisation interrupts his personal crisis. That the visitors are anything but friendly can come as no surprise and saving the world becomes the order of the day.
Once the aliens (whose spaceships and body armour look nothing like also-ran’s from Michael Bay’s recent “design me a Transformer” competition) arrive, all that carefully crafted human drama falls by the wayside. The coast of Hawaii turns into a battleground where the combined forces of America and Japan try to defend the planet’s honour in a confusing, bizarrely edited and bewilderingly scripted collection of flashing images.
Any film that makes you long for the coherence and reserve of a Michael Bay movie is a truly special sort of flick and that’s just what Battleship is.
Despite having the potential to be so bad it’s good, the constant clanging jingoism and action scenes that seem to all be recycled from slightly less offensive, equally expensive action craptaculars means it’s just bad.
I’d say avoid Battleship like the plague but it does a disservice to the good name of plague.
Speaking of ugh. Contraband. If ever there was a film that could be classed as “offensively ordinary” this is it.
Starring Mahk Effin’ Wahlberg as a smuggler who gets dragged into doing “one last job”, it’s a remake (but not really) of an Icelandic film that starred the director, Baltasar Kormákur.
Given the original won a bunch of awards in its native country, I hope whoever adapted the screenplay did a really bad job of representing the source material because if not then you have to womder about what Iceland considers a good flick.
Wahlberg’s ex-smuggler Chris gets pulled back into his old life when his young brother-in-law lands himself on the wrong side of an unstable drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi). In order to pay off the debt he organises an elaborate scam to ship a pile of fake currency into the US – no prizes for guessing if everything goes off without a hitch or not.
Co-starring Kate Beckinsale as Wahlberg’s wife and Ben Foster as his best mate and former partner-in-crime and even the great JK Simmons as a cranky sea captain, there’s no reason that Contraband couldn’t have been a perfectly acceptable little crime thriller. Unfortunately, beyond the occasional moment of tension as the lads try to coordinate their scam, the cliché-riddled plot has other ideas and, as matters unfold with the crushing predictability of Columbo have “just one more question”, you have to wonder who passed the script as being shipshape for production.
While it’s a cut above most of the direct-to-dvd dross out there, Contraband is still a gigantic disappointment given the raw materials it had to work with.