Battleship - C

Rated PG-13, 131 minutes

"Battleship":  Mindless and really just "Transformers" at sea

As a kid, I enjoyed playing the board game "Battleship" to guess the coordinates of and ultimately sink my opponent's battleship to win the game. As an adult, I wished I had the same enjoyment for the mindless, CG-laden new action film "Battleship," based very loosely on the Hasbro game and reimagined as a cross between "Transformers" and  "Independence Day." Loud, clanky and utterly ridiculous, the loose energy and the impressive visual effects are entertaining but can't overcome the lousy dialogue, bad acting and super-dumb story (i.e. everything else). "John Carter's" Taylor Kitsch is Alex, a twenty-something slacker recruited by his older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard of "True Blood") to the Navy to man him up. Alex falls in love with Sam (Brooklyn Decker also in this week's "What to Expect When Your Expecting"), the daughter of the commander (Liam Neeson, very small role). Some nasty aliens pick up on a powerful NASA signal and threaten to take over the world but first must get pass the Navy in a water fight near Hawaii. "Battleship" is cheesy but forgettable guilty-pleasure fun that's essentially "Transformers" at sea, unsurprising given co-producer Hasbro's huge influence here as the creator of the board game. Director Peter Berg ("Hancock") fills the film with plenty of sublime explosions and enormous machines that are visually striking, but grounds the film with awful dialogue and super bland leads in Kitsch and Decker; the one decent actor in "Battleship," Neeson, is relegated to only a handful of scenes and is missing from a large chunk of the movie. There's also a huge disconnect with the aliens who demonstrate an awful sense of unoriginality and familiarity (really just a smaller version of a transformer). "Battleship," with a few elements of the game loosely incorporated in (though those unfamiliar with the game won't know), dumbs itself down perfectly for the summer movie-going audience and has already proved to be a huge hit overseas. Worth a look if you enjoy this sort of obtuse action entertainment.