Hollywood Tripe at Its Worst

Rating: 3/10 (7 January 2020)

I watched this movie on a flight from Oakland to Kauai, after I'd already watched a really good film (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). I was looking for something light and easy, that I wouldn't mind missing the end of if it lasted longer than the rest of the flight did. I can assure you that I did not mind missing the end of it.
The two stars, Jason Momoa and Amber Heard, are pretty good eye candy, as were a couple of the second-stringers, gorgeous Patrick Wilson and still-stunning Nicole Kidman. Some, but definitely not all of the special effects are well done. Otherwise, what a waste of celluloid, or electrons, or whatever movies are made out of these days.
Both Momoa and Heard are atrociously one-dimensional actors who can't even pull off the clichÃ©d, tough-guy lines they've been given in any kind of believable cowboys-and-Indians way. They'd be the runts of the litter in any 6th-grade drama class, except for their good looks.
The script is so bad that its predictability and the simple-mindedness of the dialogue are actually one of the most fun parts of watching the movie. The plot is full of lazy, dumb shortcuts that break the movie's few asinine rules about Atlantis and sea-people vs. land-people as soon as they've been laid out. E.g., our hero and heroine, ferocious Atlantan royalty who can swim better than anything in the ocean, have to steal a boat to get from the coast of Italy? Greece? (someplace on the Mediterranean) to get to an off-shore island so close that it can easily be seen with the naked eye.
If you shaved down all the overly long, gratuitous fight scenes, you could probably cut the running time of this potboiler by about 50%. Which would be a blessing. Thank heavens for the fast forward button.
I'd been willing to suspend disbelief, as one always must with sci-fi/fantasy films, but this thing is dumber than the crappiest 1950s horror film you could ever imagine. So, of course, it made over $160 million, and a sequel is planned. Yay, Tinseltown. It's hard to tell how much to blame the director and producers for (justifiably) holding their audience in contempt, as opposed to not being able to produce a decent product even in a lowbrow genre like comic book movies.