I knew this movie would be stupid, but...

Rating: Null/10 (16 February 2002)

There is a movie from about thirty years ago called "The Dirty Dozen", which, if I remember correctly (I haven't seen it again lately) was about a bunch of criminals, perverts and psychos who are sent to a suicide mission behind enemy lines; if they got back alive, they would be pardoned. This movie spawned a series of sequels and ripoffs, none of which was as good as the original, as it is usual in these cases. The latest of this bad imitations, and probably the most ridiculous, is "Armageddon," a centaur of a movie in which the old world-goes-blooey theme gets spliced with the Dirty Dozen concept. Granted, in this movie the heroes are not actually criminals (I guess that would be stretching things beyond breaking point), but they are as close to that as you can be without actually getting in real trouble with the law (beyond the occasional bar brawl, I mean).
Now, the Dirty Dozen didn't really have much trouble in the plausibility department, because the idea of reckless, nothing-to-lose men being more able to carry out a not completely kosher kamikaze mission than regular and disciplined soldiers is not unbelievable. But, why are we supposed to believe that, true as it is that the powers that be can be quite dumb, they would trust the delicate task of saving the Earth to a bunch of unreliable, undisciplined, uneducated, unprovided-for in the brains department, un-everything-that-matters bunch of louts, instead of asking regular astronauts and scientists, who are paid anyway to deal with such things? In most movies of this kind you just know that what you are seeing is not real, but at least while the movie lasts you believe it. That famous suspension of disbelief stuff, remember? The funny thing is that the movie seems to be aware of its weaknesses and does nothing to address them. At one point Willis's character asks: There are so many billions of people in the world, why me? And later, hearing the scheme to destroy the asteroid, he asks: Now is this the best you could come up with? Interesting questions! The pity is, nobody thinks it fit to answer.
Even if the movie concept was silly, it could have been saved if at least it had some good action in it, but I have to say I felt amazed (considering its juicy budget) at how incompetently this movie was made: the action scenes are all shot in images shuffled at machine-gun speed and hardly intelligible, and how can you root for the good guys if you can hardly see them? And the syrupy, saccharinous, high-glucose, actually-poisonous-for-diabetics love story thrown in for the chicks' benefitÂ… well, I'm a chick, and my opinion is Yikes! I wish they stopped doing that! If a girl watches an action movie, it is because she likes action! If she wanted to watch sentimental drivel she would stay home and watch the Hallmark Channel!