Rating of
2/4
"Battle: Los Angeles" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 05/08/12
A squad of US Marines are sent into war-torn Los Angeles to rescue a group of stranded civilians during an alien invasion. The comparisons to Independence Day are obvious, but Battle: Los Angeles takes itself far more seriously than Roland Emmerich's fun-filled cheese fest. In fact Johnathan Liebesman has clearly seen Black Hawk Down one too many times and I suspect that writer Christopher Bertolini gets slightly tumescent every time he sees an army recruitment poster. It's basically just a generic war film with added aliens but the script makes the usual mistake of concentrating on action rather than story, resulting in a bunch of characters that are introduced only through ten minutes of soap opera at the beginning and never interact again apart from bellowing military jargon at each other punctuated by teary-eyed flag saluting and laughably sentimental cliches. This means that although the action sequences are very impressive, it's pretty hard to care what happens to anybody so any emotional drama or suspense instantly evaporates. It's nowhere near as wretched as Skyline, but little more than a corny old John Wayne war movie with a face lift, this film is a joyless, mechanical affair that is sorely missing what makes a B-Movie work; namely a sense of spectacle and most importantly of all, fun.
