Not quite the worst

Rating: 6/10 (24 May 2005)

This is not the worst "Star Wars" movie. That would be "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" simply because it's impossible to ignore how irritating Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd are. "Attack of the Clones" isn't very superior to "Phantom Menace," but at least Jar Jar only has a cameo.
As it is, this is a very unbalanced film. The action scenes are superb. There's a spectacular chase through the city-planet Coruscant in flying cars, a battle in an asteroid field, Ben Kenobi versus Jango Fett, and a colossal land battle between the Jedi, their clone army, and a horde of assorted battle droids. If you can overlook the flat CGI nature of most of this, it's great fun. The only action scene that doesn't work is a sequence on the assembly line of a robot factory, because it's unnecessary and exactly like a level in every video game ever made.
So that was the good part. The bad part is that the middle third of the film is almost entirely given over to a romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme, played respectively by Hayden Christiensen and Natalie Portman. I can ignore the shallow acting in the action scenes, because it matches the Flash Gordon-serial quality of the whole thing, but the romance depends entirely on its actors, and it falls flat. We know they'll fall in love and produce Luke and Leia, so it's a bit of a fait accompli with no energy in the writing.
The best way to watch this is with a book in hand, so you can mute the TV during the romantic twaddle, and come back for the good bits. If you let yourself enjoy the eye candy and don't expect anything truly rewarding or memorable, you'll have a good time. As the middle section of a trilogy that was already fairly redundant, "Attack of the Clones" serves to set up the next film, but doesn't really have much meat of its own.