Attack of the critic

Rating: 3/10 (1 August 2013)

After the release of "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace", most people thought that it was the worst film in the "Star Wars" franchise and would always be. Three years later, in 2002, they were proved wrong.
The fifth film by release date, "Attack of the Clones" is an example of a poorly written story with characters and dialog that are laughably bad. Unlike with "Revenge of the Sith" and "The Phantom Menace", I can not seem to find anything other than part of the arena sequence that I liked in this film that was not carried over from the previous films.
Starting off the bat, I know something is wrong. I am already asking questions based on the information that the opening crawl has given me. That is not a good sign.
Next, we have our plot that is a mix of a romance, mystery, action, and adventure that is poorly glued together. We have a mystery tone with Obi-Wan trying to solve a "who done it" mystery while Anakin and Padme go off and have a romance tone. The two tones mix poorly and I am left annoyed after every change between the two stories.
Each step of the story left me either bored, annoyed, or confused, and then we come to the big final battle. I enjoyed the arena sequence when it started out with the Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padme fending off three giant monsters without any weapons other than their own ingenuity. Then the Jedi came and everything went down the drain with a large, seizure inducing battle that I had little interest in because there was no tension.
After that, the surviving Jedi escape and Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda duel Count Dooku who escapes after injuring Anakin and Obi-Wan. Even with the final shots of the film, the tone still fluctuates poorly between a mysterious tone with Dooku and Sidious and with Windu, Yoda, and Obi- Wan, a dramatic tone with Palpatine watching the new clone army, and a romance tone with Anakin and Padme getting married.
The dialog and characters are terrible in this film. Anakin is whiny, complains about Obi-Wan all of the time, and is completely arrogant, and we are supposed to feel sympathy and understand his anger when he kills a bunch of Tusken Raiders for killing his mother. If we can not feel sympathy for such a terrible person, we will not understand why he is doing what he does as it feels to us like he deserves it. The romance dialog is so bad it is cringe worthy. When watching just one scene of Anakin trying to woo Padme with his awful romantic cliché dialog, I feel so embarrassed to be watching the film I want to shut it off.
Everyone in this film is pretty boring when it comes to acting, with the exception of Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid. Christensen is at his worst here, being completely wooden, even when he admits he killed the Tusken Raiders, it sounds more like he is apologizing for dropping one of their dishes and not killing a bunch of Tusken Raiders. Natalie Portman also under does her acting in this, with her saying, "Look," to announce rescue sounds more like she is pointing out a car window at a deer grazing by the side of the road.
With a poor mix of tones, bad characters, a story that leaves me asking questions, and with terrible and cliché romance elements, I am left to view this as the worst movie in the "Star Wars" saga.