The Island Movie Review

Director Michael Bay ("The Rock," "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor") has become the poster boy for everything that's wrong with blockbuster summer movies. As long as his out-sized action fare has expensive explosions, quick-cut chase scenes with spectacular crashes, a few commercial-quotable one-liners, one very hot chick, and several low-angle, slow-motion dolly shots that endlessly circle his heroes, he apparently couldn't care about much else.

In "The Island," the chase scene is on a hovering rocket-cycle, the hot chick is heart-stopping Scarlett Johansson (hopefully just taking a break from brainier fare like "Minority Report," "Brave New World" and several other sources with only cursory attempts to disguise them, counting on its target audience being too ignorant to notice.

With the help of a sympathetic colony worker (comic-reliever Steve Buscemi), the clones track down Lincoln's "sponsor," a famous racecar driver (also McGregor, using his real Scottish accent) with a failing liver. This meeting leads to more discoveries, more high-octane chases, and eventually Lincoln's attempt to shut down the clone farm in a third act so full of holes it's a wonder the film doesn't get tangled up in the projector.

If Michael Bay was going for a slightly cerebral action thriller -- which he seems to think he was -- "The Island" isn't half as smart as it needed to be. If he was hoping audiences would check their brains at the door, "The Island" fails to earn the courtesy. All the flash and fury add up to few thrills, save one seat-gripping freeway pile-up. (The movie is often unaccountably violent, with a body count that is enormous but largely anonymous and ignored.)

The best that can be said for the picture is that it looks great (although the rocket-bike chase has surprisingly cheap blue-screen effects), it sounds great, it offers a few glimmers of unnerving near-future possibilities (like surrogate-pregnancy clones), and it has several talented cast members who do what they can with their thin characters amid $100-million worth of shallow Hollywood spectacle.