The Island

There is so much product placement in Michael Bay's bombastic The Island that it's like reading 'Marketing Week' in a washing machine. Halfway through the film, safely past the intriguing set-up and blithely blasting from one deranged chase to another, your thoughts turn to the role of brands in the modern action-adventure movie. Here's hoping Microsoft, Nokia, Aquafina, Michelob, Budweiser, Calvin Klein, Ben & Jerry and Puma got their money's worth. Each time their brands pop up, we are knocked out of the film's world and back into our boring old one. Sponsored content is the big thing in Hollywood right now. Suspension of disbelief, it seems, is old hat.

If this seems like a minor point to open with, it is indicative of how flippantly constructed The Island is. Characters get out of impossible predicaments with no explanation, or desultory ones. Plot lines are introduced and not developed. Michael Bay directs as if he is wearing boxing gloves and the only punch in his repertoire is the haymaker. No feint, no jab, no fancy footwork. Just slug after slug after slug. He sets out to resuscitate cliché with bombast, but after each jolt of pyrotechnics the corpse flops back on the slab.

Squinting past all the sound and fury, you can just make out a decent idea for a film. What if the super-rich paid to have a clone made of themselves that could be harvested for organs when their own excesses get the better of them? What would the life of that clone be like? And what if that clone escaped out into the world to confront their original self? It's the kind of premise Philip K Dick would have made psychedelic hay out of. In fact, it is exactly the premise of Michael Marshall Smith's novel 'Spares', which DreamWorks had an option on for an age, but everyone has decided to be an asshole about that, and Marshall Smith gets no credit here.

Ewan McGregor plays Lincoln Six Echo. He's troubled by a recurring nightmare and suspects that all is not well in the cultish utopia in which he finds himself. He has a flirty thing going on with Scarlett Johansson's Jordan Two Delta, but since they both have the mental age of teenagers and their masters omit sex from their brain programming, they can only express their desire via an Xbox sponsored fighting game. It's a lift from Futureworld, the sequel to Michael Crichton's Westworld. Crichton's Coma is also borrowed from wholesale, as is Blade Runner and Total Recall. Logan's Run is a major influence. The speeder bike chase from Return Of The Jedi is borrowed, as is its distinctive roaring sound design. There is even a chase the wrong way up the freeway, because obviously audiences haven't seen enough of that particular idea, as it has only appeared in To Live And Die In L.A., Ronin, The Matrix Reloaded and Paycheck.

Anyway, Lincoln and Jordan are meant to be survivors of a terrible pathogen, which is why they are sealed away in what resembles a Scientology health club. But Lincoln senses something is wrong. He rails against his boring breakfast. He wants bacon, not that pansy-assed porridge. He even does a bit of stand-up comedy about Tofu when complaining to doctor Merrick (Sean Bean). Lincoln hooks up with engineer McCord (Buscemi), who teaches him how to drink liquor and appreciate a pin-up of a pretty lady. McCord is a pretty funny character although he provides Bay with far too many opportunities to fill his frame with the flying sparks of grinding iron, his off-the-peg signifier of working guy authenticity. He also has to mouth a brand placement for Budweiser, while Lincoln and Jordan sit under the giant neon Budweiser sign he conveniently keeps in his front room.

And still the studios expect us to take their film seriously? To treat it with respect? Lincoln Six Echo discovers the truth about his existence and goes on the run with his girl. It's all about freedom, you see. Although it could equally be about running, because the characters shout "Run!" in just about every scene. The Island delivers its messages about freedom with its fingers crossed behind its back. Freedom so long as it does not obscure the sponsor's logo. Freedom so long as the focus groups say they like it. For all its posturing, this is not rugged American Individualism - this is freedom as imagined by a MBA suit with a John Wayne fetish.

So what's good here? Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson have plenty of charm and charisma, although Johansson is dolled up like Pamela Anderson most of the time. The scene where Lincoln Six Echo meets his counterpart gives Ewan McGregor a great opportunity to send himself up, and explain why his performance has been saddled with such an awful American accent.

The actors do what they can to put a little space between the exploding things, but given that their characters have a mental age of 15, their love affair recalls those 'Love is...' cartoons. What in other hands could have been the first sci-fi film to address the era of Homeland Security, in which a nanny state makes products of its people and exploits them with misinformation, is lost in a flurry of brands and bangs. Also, the action is boringly retro. Like a 1970s cop show, it's all punch-ups, car chases and dangling from tall buildings. This is a film terrified of spaces, of silence. Brash but insecure, it has absolutely no confidence in its audience's intelligence and as a result is more of an assault on humanity than a celebration of it.