Battle: Los Angeles

Case in point: Battle: Los Angeles, an alien-invasion disaster piece so loud, ham-fisted and joyless-so aggressively lousy-that its only real usefulness is to make one better appreciate the deft touch of a Roland Emmerich.

Terminally stupid.

If the talk had been surgically removed, leaving only the sights and sounds of combat, this could have been a striking, semiabstract display of aggressive energy; as it is, any viewer over twelve will go for the laughs.

One doesn't approach a movie like this expecting Shakespearean drama. Unlike some films with loftier ambitions, Battle Los Angeles pretty much delivers what it promises:

The film constantly blows thick smoke up our a---s and calls it charity.

The special effects are mediocre and the story is strewn with the type of plot inconsistencies and lazy dialogue all-too-typical of today's post-content blockbusters.

Our plot and attention is not split and spread to several places or groups of people around the country and world. We stick with one group the whole way through and that's the movie's strength.

After a shotgun wedding between Black Hawk Down and Independence Day, this movie was the unwanted offspring—an unintelligible mixture of war movies and science-fiction that insults the credibility of both genres.

It’s aim was to be a pre-summer popcorn action movie and it hits it’s mark.

Thanks to some awesome action sequences and Eckhart's performance, this film is worth a look.