BATTLE: LOS ANGELES Review

"Battle: Los Angeles" (2011)

"Battle: Los Angeles" is an embarrassment and a travesty of American cinema that unfortunately dominated the box office this weekend. Pegged as a realistic alien invasion flick, the movie is nearly two hours of incomprehensible chaos and destruction. Even if all you're looking for is Los Angeles to get blown up and leveled by aliens, look elsewhere. Director Jonathan Liebesman works on a grand scale all right creating a vast landscape of dust, rubble and debris, but that's all we get. Given its premise and all those explosions on screen, the movie manages to be a boring, ugly and inept exercise in careless monotony.

In the style of "District 9"--which looks like a full-blown masterpiece standing next to this--we're introduced through news reports playing in the background on TV sets that clusters of meteors are headed toward the earth in major cities all across the globe. A crew of marines is deployed in Santa Monica to take care of the foreign invaders. They're helicoptered in and immediately get attacked while traversing a landscape that is engulfed in smoke and flames. Although they're supposedly running around Santa Monica, they could be anywhere in the world, and we wouldn't know the difference; that's how horrendously the film is shot. The one potentially interesting part--the guerrilla-style shaky-cam cinematography--is botched terribly. Each insanely brief frame contains an incoherent mess of flashes and gunshots with maybe a character's profile yelling something loud in the forefront, all a result of lazy editing.

The characters--if you can call them that--are all nameless faces wearing a military uniform, their faces covered in blood, dirt and grime. Even the civilians the marines pick up along the way are bland and featureless. The only recognizable faces are Michelle Rodriguez looking tired and, God help him, Aaron Eckhart who somehow got trapped within this shambles of filmmaking. Tried as he did to make a performance, he couldn't get around terrible dialogue. In what was meant to be an uplifting motivational moment, Eckhart's hero, Staff Sgt. Nantz, delivers an unintentionally laughable monologue reeking of cheese.

Aside from this one moment, the rest of the movie's dialogue consists of one to two phrase-long shouts and guttural roars of anger or triumph. There's a macho "hoo-rah" bravado in everything the marines say that is sickening. They are a team of war movie clichés stampeding around as placeholders for storyline and characterization that is not there.

The movie strategically avoids talking about and showing the actual aliens--you know, the entire focus of the movie--as much as possible. I don't blame them, however, because once you see these things, you'll wonder to yourself why a big budget film like this couldn't get a better special effects team. From afar and clouded in smog the aliens look quite ominous, but up close they look like things created from leftovers in a junkyard with artillery attachments. Now, I understand leaving it open for discussion and not clearly explaining what the aliens want or how they work--à la "War of the Worlds"--but this movie doesn't even do that. It attempts an explanation but then drops it and never follows up.

The aliens are here for our water. They have a vulnerable spot to the right of their heart; shoot that to kill them. All of their spacecrafts look the same like floating piles of scrap metal, but some are more important than others. Do they get defeated? I couldn't even tell. Instead, the movie is too busy feeding us crap about the marines, honor, duty and servitude.

A video game would've done a better job presenting what "Battle: Los Angeles" abysmally failed at. After 30 minutes realizing there was nothing left for the movie to offer, I checked out and was impatiently waiting for it to be over. It's such a painful and unnecessary bombardment on the senses to the point of being unbearable and unwatchable. Worst of all, it didn't even make an attempt at humor or humanity. By the end I couldn't even differentiate the aliens from the humans because they all were so robotic. What easily could've been cool, fun, explosive alien action was turned into what I perceived to be a marines recruitment video, and that is the movie's biggest offense of all.

"Machete" (2010)

Remember how "Grindhouse," the 2007 exploitation cinema epic from directing team Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, had those fake trailers in between the two features? Well, something had to come from those trailers, and here it is from Rodriguez: an expanded feature length version of his trailer and arguably the best of the trailers, "Machete." As the trailer was so pitch-perfect, Rodriguez certainly knows his way around the genre of trashy 70s action flicks. The movie works like a Hispanic blaxploitation movie, and while outlandishly violent, gory and preposterous it is also loudly political and timely which actually become the movie's most tongue-in-cheek moments. So now with the full movie to accompany the trailer, it boils down to whether or not less is more in the case of this battered and scarred federale.

Danny Trejo plays the lead, and at the age of 66 he carries the part effortlessly as a badass just as he did in the trailer. With a scar covered face, a tattooed body and long haggard hair, Trejo never cracks one smile and says lines like, "Machete don't text" with such flat, assured delivery that he's funny without even trying. With an all-business, blade-slashing attitude, he gets the women and mows down the bad guys with astonishing reserve. As Machete, he gets set up to assassinate a racist Texas politician (Robert De Niro) who wants to stop illegal immigration by implementing a large electric fence on the Mexican border. Arriving at the job, he gets double-crossed and left for dead (all described in the original trailer) leaving him to fend for his life and take revenge on those who hurt him. Revolucion is in the air, blades get sharpened and the blood begins to spew.

The movie's mood is perpetually pissed off, and while this allows the action and dialogue to seethe with rage it also detracts from its ability to have as much fun as it perhaps could have. A lot of bits are funny in their intentional B-movie flair, but many of the characters' one-liners actually fall flat on their face. And in its openly deadpan mockery of exploitation schlock full of gratuitous levels of sleaze, it tips too far into the self-serious realm, and for a few instances it becomes exactly the type of schlock it initially wants to satirize. Rodriguez and his co-director Ethan Maniquis have a love for the genre but too often forget to wink more knowingly at their audience.

There are some absurdly brutal action sequences including the rousing opening along with one involving a person's intestines and medical utensils and another boasting the creative use of gardening tools such as a weed whacker. A lot of this action, however, is front-loaded and wears out its shock value far too early in the rather lengthy running time. It begins to lose momentum by the end when the chaos should have been ramping up the most. A lot of it turns into waiting for certain bits from the fake trailer, which do make their way into the real thing, and they end up being some of the very best parts. Some of the mid-section turns to unnecessary plodding, which goes to answering the initial question of whether or not less is more.

From Steven Seagal who has the appearance of a lumpy piece of meat to Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez who are equally obliged to just look hot, the ensemble cast is great and everyone appears to be having a blast. Robert De Niro and Jeff Fahey are a hoot, and best of all is Lindsay Lohan with the way her character is introduced considering her recent antics in the tabloid spotlight. She spends the majority of her time completely naked and eventually dons a nun outfit toting around a machine gun. While "Machete" may not stand among the likes of Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," it's worth seeing if not just for Lohan's outrageous final screen performance before her time in jail.