ARMAGEDDON (1998)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
(Originally viewed in 1998)
"Armageddon" is one of the guiltiest pleasures of my reviewing career - an obscenely loud, unnecessarily expensive, fairly exciting, often hysterical action film about meteors crashing down on Earth, notably New York City (the city of much apocalyptic destruction, pre-and-post-9/11).
One obscenely huge asteroid, the size of a small country, is about to crash down on Earth and destroy it. Billy Bob Thornton, in the movie's best performance, is the laconic NASA official who decides the best plan of defense is to hire...oil drillers (!) to stop the deadly asteroid by a rather odd and impossibly complicated plan - drilling a hole through its center and planting a nuclear bomb. Huh? Oh, yeah, and detonate it but naturally there has to be a sacrifice. Hey, it's only a movie, especially when the oil drillers are played by Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Michael Clarke Duncan and the hilarious Steve Buscemi. Oh, and there's Liv Tyler as Willis's daughter, but the less said about her, the better - Animal Crackers notwithstanding.
"Armageddon" is silly, fast-paced, overlong, junky, nonsensical moviemaking with more cuts and fast-moving camera angles per second than ten Martin Scorsese movies cobbled together (no other director matches Michael Bay for trying to outdo what Irwin Allen had done with "Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure," for starters. I did say try). The idea is to give you a migraine the size of an asteroid, not to entertain you. I admit I was entertained. Still, this type of plotless stupidity has its limitations in an overworked genre. Don't see it more than once.
