Alas, the end of the world was not nigh

Rating: 2/10 (23 December 2004)

While watching this film, I was reminded of the futility of trusting politicians. This moment came when the President of the United States said "the bible calls this time Armageddon - the end of all things"It's a sad fact, but life is never that kind.
When big, bad, balding, butch Bruce looks solemnly into the camera and, with creditable sincerity, delivers the line "six billion people on the planet, why d'ya call me?" you know something special is afoot. Lesser men - Lawrence Olivier, maybe, or Alec Guinness - would have cringed at the thought of having to deliver such verbiage without an ironic sneer. Not Bruce. Bruce, like the women of Sunset Strip, is a pro. Either that, or ironic sneers were not required in his contract. Judging by the rest of the film, neither were shame, dignity or self-respect.
Were there ever to be an unholy union between Top Gun and Cobra, the cinematic wreckage that would result might resemble Armageddon. It's a testosterone fuelled, guttural paean to trailer park America.
In many Hollywood films, for instance, technical jargon is used to pad out a dull script. Armageddon is no exception, except that here the writers clearly couldn't be bothered to find any real jargon and just made stuff up. Zero Barrier for example - what the hell is that? Freedom is "off the Grid" I mean pleeease! Jargon this implausible hasn't been heard since the British Government implored junkies not to shared their "works". Even taking into account the fact that I was hardly expecting Woody Allen, it's just awful.
Special effects wail around the vacuum where the story is supposed to be, looking for something to do, looking for something to affect, looking to go bang. It's not surprising then that, many, many things bang in this film - and I'm not talking about Ben Afleck. Immediately following a distasteful little scene where our Bruce is driving golf balls at people in a Greenpeace boat, and playing it for the hilarious laughs such behaviour obviously deserves, his Oil Rig explodes. Then his test rig at NASA explodes, then the Russian Space Station, then a Space Shuttle, Then a Thermonuclear Device, followed shortly (and mercifully) by himself.
Things go bang, then. Good basis for a multi-million dollar film project.
But by far and away the most depressing thing about this film is the cast list. Leaving aside the bald one, whose occasional forays into the world of acting we already knew to be liberally interspersed with pap of the highest order, there's Steve Buscemi (not only a good actor, but a very decent director), Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Afleck, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jason Isaacs, Peter Stormare (who somehow manages to steal it, though give it back, I say) - I mean even Owen Wilson. Do none of these people know better? Obviously not.
Some will no doubt say that I am being a curmudgeon, and that not all films need to explore the "depths of humanity". I agree.Unfortunately, this film does explore the depths of humanity, it just doesn't realise it's doing it. 2/10