A big barrel of noise and flashes for the ADD generation

Rating: 4/10 (9 August 2010)

The second (and better) of 1998's dynamic duo of garbage about heavenly objects on a collision course with Earth - although this says more about the lousy quality of the earlier Deep Impact rather than any specific accomplishments of this ordeal. A giant asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and NASA taps oil rig worker Bruce Willis and his motley band to travel to the stars to intercept the asteroid, drill into it and blow it to pieces before impact. Naturally precursor fragments hit Earth first to give us a small taste of the disaster that could be coming. The entire scenario is ludicrous, but the film knows it and seems to revel in it. Dumb can be fun if done well, but Armageddon is not particularly well done, despite having some promising elements. Lead Willis normally has two settings depending on the project - smarmy and lifeless. Since this is a "crowd-pleasing" action flick, he trots out smarmy and manages to be thoroughly obnoxious. Look quick for Owen Wilson and Michael Clarke Duncan as some of the lesser members of the team. Billy Bob Thornton acquits himself nicely slumming it up as a sympathetic NASA official. Will Patton also manages to turn in a "real" performance as another oil rigger. Ben Affleck manages to be appealing in his first "big budget" effort and Liv Tyler is coltishly sexy as Willis' daughter and the token love interest. Keeping in the spirit of the film's overwhelming machismo, she gets to stay behind and look fretful while the "real" men do the work. Actually Jessica Steen accompanies as a co-pilot, but since someone forgot to write her a role she is fairly irrelevant. The screenplay is a mess - there is barely any sort of character development and suspense is marginal at best. The tone is jingoistic to the point of nausea - there are so many flags flying that it seems like Fox News Channel at its most pandering. The cinematography is like ball-bearings in a blender with assorted eyeball-burning flashes thrown in for good measure. There are literally no sustained shots for more than 3 seconds and action scenes are often incomprehensible due to so many non-stop quick cuts. A real endurance test visually with nothing there mentally to pick up the slack.