The Island- **1/2

The Island is this year’s I, Robot, only much, much lazier. It’s a movie with an interesting idea, but two very conflicting ways of dealing with it. Rather than suck it up, pick one, and make the movie, they took the lazy way and tried to do both, with extremely mixed results. This is confused movie, with no center, and it tries to cover this up with blustery action and pretty costars. Sadly, it doesn’t work.

The Island starts out in a facility for the survivors of a world “contamination.” It is a calm, sterile world, where the people are given mundane jobs and are allowed almost no contact with the opposite sex. Their only hope is to win the lottery, which sends one lucky inhabitant to The Island, the last uncontaminated place on Earth. One particular inhabitant, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewen MacGregor) begins to question his world, and soon discovers the secret: they are actually clones of rich people, created so the rich people can use them to harvest organs when needed. Of course, this movie is directed by Michael Bay, and this plot doesn’t lend itself to explosions, so something must be done. Lincoln Six Echo escapes with Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) in tow, and suddenly there are several guns and explosions. I’m assuming this is supposed to be a plot twist, but like most movies that come out now, the plot twists are given away in the previews, so I find myself wondering why they bother even pretending.

I used to like Michael Bay movies, simple things like The Rock, full of manly pomp and bluster and fights and guns. But it’s movies like this where he tries to do too much where he fails (Pearl Harbor anyone?). The large action scenes, specifically in the middle (which seems to be a very strange turn moves are taking now- putting the huge action scenes in the middle and ending with a lame climax), seem completely out of place. Do they need to fall from a skyscraper on a giant letter R? No, especially since the writers didn’t bother to write a creative or even vaguely believable way out of it. Do they need to have the highway chase? No, especially when it’s nearly the same exact scene as in Bay’s earlier Bad Boys II. Even the addition of the flying motorcycles doesn’t seem to raise the bar. All it does is make me wonder why everyone is still driving cars if there are flying motorcycles available.

So the sci-fi bits are just dull, and the action bits are unexciting, so what are we left with? Well, there’s the merciless product placement (the worst offence being Scarlett Johansson standing on the street watching the Calvin Klein ads from a few years back that feature Scarlett Johansson. It’s the most obnoxious bit of smug winking-to-the-audience since Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Twelve). There’s Ewen MacGregor’s spotty American accent. There’s Scarlett Johansson’s rather odd-looking lips, which seems to have gotten larger and strangely flatter since Lost in Translation. On the upside, there’s Djimon Hounsou, who’s always fun to watch. But Sean Bean is again predictably cast as the predictable bad guy with the predictable bad guy name of Merrick. Will someone please give Sean Bean a decent role for God’s sake?

I know this is a pretty scathing review for two and a half stars, but I do have to admit I can’t even really hate it for being bad, because it very well could’ve been Armageddon. But I do hate it for being mediocre. I hate it for having the pretense of being something interesting, but being so unwilling to do anything at all interesting at all. I hate it because it wasn’t a movie, but a 127 minute advertisement for Clavin Klein, Aquafina, Chrysler, Michelob, MSN, Adidas, Puma and any others I may have forgot. I hate it mostly because they didn’t try. This is the laziest movie I’ve seen in a while, and I saw Fantastic 4. I think the fact it’s flopping at the box office should prove that. Maybe the producers, instead of setting up website devoted to passing all the blame to the actors, should actually watch their crappy movie and learn from their mistakes. But somehow, I doubt that.