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ARMAGEDDON Send This Review to a Friend
The best thing that can be said about ARMAGEDDON is that it's better than "Deep Impact." But oh what a headache you risk. This is a picture in which buildings in New York are destroyed near the beginning as a teaser. Later, as another teaser, we get to see Paris all but disappear. Bruce Willis is the man who may save the world with his motley but amusing oil drilling crew, including a loose cannon played by the irrepressible Steve Buscemi, who must turn into astronauts in a matter of days, land on the asteroid about to wipe out the earth and detonate a nuclear explosion to change the intruder's course. Sound familiar?
There aren't as many leaden personal sagas as in "Deep Impact," but what's here is bad enough: Driller Ben Affleck, whom Willis regards as his son, is in love with Liv Tyler, Willis's daughter whom pop over-protects. The up side of the ending of the world would be putting these characters out of their misery along with the rest of us.
For a while the humor, action and intensity are moderately enjoyable, but director Michael Bay soon enders everything so relentless--thundering non-stop music, jangling fast cuts and endless special effects and explosive sound effects, all on the assumption that more is always better and even more is better yet. The excess vitiates anything in the film that's good. Mid-way I began to long for the Armageddon of "Armageddon."
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