dumb, across the board

Rating: 2/10 (23 April 2008)

This is the movie that technically talented but shallow people (people who think Star Wars is deep) would make. Even if you buy the premise, of all the people this event would affect in Manhattan, we have to spend the whole movie with dumb, inarticulate, shouting, self-absorbed 25 year olds (all of them white, natch), who couldn't think their way out of a dumpster. I guess all non-white people over 25 made it off Manhattan. You just get the feeling that these shallow dicks cannot wait to tell everyone it happened to them.
The movie takes all of about twenty minutes to squander its potential. It starts with an interminable, dumb party scene whose entire purpose is to convince 25 year old viewers that the characters are cool enough (and the right age) to identify with. There is nothing of later importance that you need to take note of in the party scene. Then we're deposited in the poorly developed, intelligence-free creature half. The design of the creature is just a massive dud. Its semi-revelation comes way too soon, at which point it's such a lame concept that the only thing the movie can be is "Biggest zoo animal ever, loose in the city." If you don't have better ideas than that, just never show the damned creature.
Just because your chosen format (video journal) doesn't allow the characters to fully understand the story, doesn't mean filmmakers can proceed without one so they can blow crap up. Why an undersea creature farts flaming bombs is just one of the juvenile resolution/conception problems (who knows?). Even if you read about the creature's back story, it makes no sense.
I was trying to imagine which idiot would be the tastiest. And couldn't this thing eat them quicker? And then track down the writers? For this to receive accusations of originality is just sad. Everything in the movie is how Hollywood does it. It never feels real (which would have saved it) because characters continually do the same dumb, scripted things that Hollywood would have them do. Eminently fast-forwardable. This is a unusually dumb, very silly movie.