Gave me motion sickness

Rating: 1/10 (23 June 2013)

A word of warning: This film made me physically ill. That is not a joke or a figure of speech. This movie literally gave me a bad case of motion sickness by halfway through, and it never let up. Had I been alone I probably would have left the theater and not returned. This marks the first time any professionally made movie has managed to do this to me in three decades of watching movies. If this represents the future of cinema I guess I'll have to stop going to the theater altogether.
The cause? The filmmaker abusively overuses Battlestar Galactica style shaky camera effects, super-fast pans and zooms and "oops the camera lost focus for a second" effects. It never lets up. They use shaky camera even in scenes where it is entirely inappropriate, like filming two people having a quiet non-moving conversation on a porch, or in an office. The random camera motion just never stops.
If you like action, boy will you love this movie. It's all kinds of action-ey. Boy howdy. Yessir, it's got all kinds of action. Have no fear, the action is not lacking at all. Action, action, action. It's non-stop action, you might even say.
If you like special effects, man will you love this film. It's got the special-est special effects since I don't know, Iron Man 3 or something. And lots of 'em! We've got effects here, effects there, effects everywhere! E-I-E-I-O!
If you like Product Placement[], my oh my you will absolutely go Bananas[] for this high quality Hollywood Blockbuster[], which contains excellent, frequent and quite obvious Product Placement[]. There will never be a moment when you say to yourself, "I really haven't seen enough Product Placement[] in this film yet." Nope.
If you like terrible, jarring scene transitions that often make no sense, well, after this delight of a film you will feel like you've had a delicious five-course meal made entirely of jarring, terribly confusing scene transitions. Including dessert!
If you like huge, ginormous plot holes big enough to drive a truck through, you will absolutely adore this flick, and you'll rush right back here and sing its praises.
And finally, if you like flat, poorly cast two-dimensional characters, you might not like this film. Because most of the characters are more one-dimensional.
Look, this is a really, really bad movie in many ways. It has a lot of serious, MAJOR problems. In fact it's so bad (and my motion sickness was so unpleasant) that it prompted me to finally register an IMDb account after at least 15 years of using this site without one, just so that I could post this review.
If you enjoy movies like Fast & Furious, you'll probably be part of the crowd that thinks this is the best movie ever made, and come back and call me an idiot. On the other hand, if you have the perception to notice when characters are flat and lifeless and writing is artificial and staged and as holey as Swiss cheese, you'll probably find this film to be a briefly entertaining bad joke like my wife and I did.
P. S. I hope I'm not the only one who is seriously disturbed by the tendency of big action films in recent years *COUGH*Transformers*COUGH* to have scenes of wanton urban destruction that would inevitably result in thousands of human deaths, while not showing anyone actually dying. These directors seem to have become disconnected from everyday human reality, which makes their films come across as hollow, artificial and lacking real emotional impact.