Houston... We have a comedy...

Rating: Null/10 (29 September 2003)

Giant asteroid is heading for Earth, hell bent on destroying the planet. What??! Better notify NASA. Since I guess maybe Superman, Ahnold, or the Ghostbusters weren't available, NASA has no choice but to call this motley crew of oil drilling experts (headed by Bruce Willis) and enlist them to go on the mother of all space missions: land on the asteroid, drill a deep hole, plug it with a nuke, beat it, detonate the nuke, and save Earth.
You will have to put me down as one of the people who liked this film - simply because I thought it was funny as hell. I haven't laughed so hard at a sci-fi-comedy since "Mars Attacks!". Almost from the very start you could easily tell that the movie, though purportedly about a horrific doomsday scenario - namely, an asteroid the size of Texas careening into planet Earth (where everybody in the world lives, wouldn't ya' know it!) - never intended itself to be taken too seriously.
It seems that every serious scene or sequence in the film was immediately followed by something totally comic or ludicrous. And it just got ludicrouser and ludicrouser as the film went on. By the time Steve Buscemi's character, Rockhound, got "space mania" and had to be duct-taped to a chair, I was nearly in stitches from laughing so hard. [If the "real" end of the world is even half as funny, well, I'm ready for it NOW.]
The movie is chock full of wonderfully wacky characters and off-the-wall dialogue that (assuming you have even a smidgen of a sense of humor) should keep you at least grinning, if not guffawing, throughout. The movie is filled with rapid-fire action sequences, almost none of which is remotely believable or even scientifically possible, but hey, it looks good, and it just adds to the overall zaniness of the film.
So for all of you space cadets who are out there in space looking for a great science fiction drama about the end of Earth, but instead found "Armageddon", a truly decent space comedy, I now command you to get on the radio and call back to Earth: "Houston... We have a comedy."