PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/22/05)

As someone who actually derived more than a couple of crass kicks from Bad Boys 2, it's entirely possible that I'm not the person best qualified to declare The Island director Michael Bay's least objectionable movie. Clearly, I'm a bit on the lax side in finding things objectionable. Still, as a working movie reviewer I'm genetically wired to have my teeth set on edge by any cinematic endeavor bearing Mr. Bay's name on the one hand, while on the other, as a person of aspiring integrity I'm obliged to report that for all of The Island's near-blinding/deafening bombast, I sat through the mega-budgeted, star-studded futuristic sci-fi thriller — in which adult-bodied but emotionally unformed clones Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson escape from the human farm they've been programmed to believe is a way station to the titular paradisical island and find themselves facing the big bad real world they'd been told no longer exists, with the added annoyance/confusion factor of having former-elite-forces (yawn) security hotshot Djimon Hounsou relentlessly dogging them with a team of trucks, choppers, air cycles and a lot of fake police uniforms — with little or no discomfort whatsoever.

Which is not to say it's a good movie. But unlike, say, Pearl Harbor, in which Bay laid waste to the heroic WWII movie, or the Bad Boys pictures, in which he further vulgarized the already hopelessly vulgar buddy-cop genre, The Island doesn't actually ruin anything. (Unless you count the cheesy 1979 sci-fi B-movie Parts aka The Clonus Horror, of which the first hour of The Island plays like a much more expensive albeit scene-for-scene remake. How this picture went through all of its phases of development and production without a single human being pointing out the rather uncanny plot similarities between the two pictures is something that, thanks to the good graces no doubt of the legal departments at Warner's and Dreamworks, we shall surely never, ever learn.) The hyperbolically whiz-bang, fast-cut action set pieces are given the most minimal setups imaginable, as audiences for these pictures don't care how we get to the spectacle just so long as we get to it quick — and this is actually refreshing, as it spares us a lot of the rote nonsense that's usually substituted for actual character development and motivation. Say this about Bay — he's sticking to what he knows. Scarlett Johansson looks lovely and hasn't much to do besides that, McGregor only starts having fun when he's playing the "original" of his clone (whom the actor rather mischievously seems to be modelling after his role in Down With Love, of all things), and you know that Hounsou's gonna do what he's got to do, and so Bay deliberately cuts it rather close — not that the turning point is ever in doubt. And Steve Buscemi is damn funny. — Glenn Kenny