If Armageddon and Transformers: Dark of the Moon had ill-advised sex in the back of Armageddon’s dad’s station wagon, Battleship would be their misbegotten offspring…and it is probably the second most hilarious movie of the year.

Now, before I go on to describe the plot that puts aliens, board games and whatever dark secret producers used to force Liam Neeson into this without getting their throats punched, I have to say as definitively as possible that this is one of the absolute worst movies I have ever seen in my life. Having said that, it was also enormously fun and entertaining for just how bad it was. It was so bad that it almost met good on the other side. This is an important distinction because it isn’t bad like Twilight , Sucker Punch or Little Red Riding Hood where you will be looking to try to open your wrists with the jagged edge of a soda lid, but it is bad like a Roger Corman movie…a B-movie that is nothing but bad writing and excess in the best possible way. It is like if Michael Bay had directed Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus only replaced Debbie Gibson with Rhianna.

The plot, which is a Frankenstein’s monster of everything from Top Gun to Independence day, follows Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) a screw up who is living on his Navy Commander brother Stone’s (Alexander Skarsgard) couch and who opens the movie breaking into a convenience store to get a chicken burrito for a girl in a bar he is hitting on. After he is tazed while trying to get the burrito to the lovely Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), Stone talks him into joining the Navy. We are also introduced to Cal (Hamish Linklater), an astrophysicist who is working on contacting an alien world that is the same distance from its sun as ours through a saucer array in Hawaii and a remote satellite that is only in range once a day. The signal goes out and we jump forward 6 years to find that Alex is a Lieutenant in the Navy and is dating Samantha, who happens to be the daughter of Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson) who doesn’t care for Alex and his shenanigans. Nothing pisses off Shane more than a guy able to identify and quote Homer but who wastes his potential on fucking up all the time. Like the USA vs Japan soccer game that kicks off an annual international war game in which Alex blows the tie by missing a penalty shot after Japanese Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) kicks him in the face. He gets in further hot water when the two of them get into a fist fight in the bathroom afterward and not only blows his chance to ask Shane for his daughter’s hand in marriage but he very likely getting booted from the military after the games are over. Once they are out on the water for the games, aliens answer the signal sent out with a small invasion force that traps part of Hawaii in a dome of energy and destroys all the ships except for Alex’s. Alex has to get over being an irresponsible loser and save the world while Sam finds herself fighting aliens on land with the help of a retired Army soldier with two prosthetic legs (Gregory D Gadson).

So, wow, up there. This movie is of course based on the board game Battleship in which you try to sink your opponents fleet with little white pegs by calling out your shots according to coordinates on a grid. It seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to carve out a story for this game that doesn’t involve aliens but Hasbro was trying to earn some Transformers money here and they didn’t seem to understand that what allows those movies to be successful in the haze of over the top CGI explosions is the nostalgia and general good will felt by people who grew up loving Optimus Prime and crying when he died in the 1986 animated movie. I like Battleship and all that doesn’t give this movie any inherent good will when nonsensical shit starts happening. Instead of what could be a tense ‘Hunt for Red October’ sort of picture, we are handed this over the top CGI explosionfest that has already used up all its credibility long before it has alien ships shooting ordinance shaped like the pegs in the game that stick into ships before they explode and the heroes have to shoot at their enemies using water displacement buoys represented on a grid just like the game. Saying ‘bravo 23’ does not make it less silly than ‘b22’ when you have a guy shouting ‘Miss!’  and ‘Hit!’ afterward. Battleship doesn’t really earn this silliness with anything cool or credible leading up to it and it just gets worse from there.

The writing is just about as bad as any I have ever seen. Characters will explain what is going on in a scene to the audience like it is an Arnold Schwarzenegger commentary, usually through Rihanna’s character Petty Officer Raikes telling another officer ‘oooh they hate each other’ as the two characters glare at each other after one has kicked the other in the face. One liners are terrible and the plot developments are telegraphed from million miles away and when  I say ‘a million miles away’ I mean from a laundry list of other much better movies that this one steals from.

The direction by Peter Berg is just as derivative as the script. Most of the action is directly quoted if not stolen completely from other movies. Shots from Transformers, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor are remade almost identically such that they could have been cut and paste jobs. The pacing is awful and makes the 131 minute movie feel like a mini-series with effects that are sometimes cool and interesting but often look unfinished and amateurish. There is also so much lens flare that I am pretty sure JJ Abrams would have stormed out of the theater.

The acting ranges from decent to goddamn terrible with actors like Peter McNicol, Liam Neeson and Alexander Skarsgard doing their best while focusing on the paycheck to just about everyone else who deliver lines like they are reading them off of an eye chart from across a football field. I am not sure if they are bad actors necessarily, although I am pretty sure Rihanna is terrible, or if they are just incredulous about the lines they are given but the performances are more wooden than a dining room table.

Now that I have bitched about all that I have to reiterate that I had a great time at this movie. It is horrible in every way possible but it is so bad that it is hilarious and fun. If you enjoy bad movies on this level then this is the movie of the year. It is sort of hard to tell if the film is meant to be this way or of it was an honest attempt to make the   a badass block buster but I don’t really care. The opening, particularly the chicken burrito theft, which is based on a video of a real convenience store break in, seems to be purposefully silly and that they are saying to the audience ‘yeah we know that this is about a board game, just relax, we aren’t terrible at our jobs’ but then there is a patriotic earnestness that happens in the third act that suggests that maybe they are really serious and think that this is kickass in the way that Hulk Hogan thought the ‘I Am a Real American’ video did. Given that Peter Berg is not an idiot and that he has made some good movies in the past, I am inclined to think he knew what he was doing but even if not, the movie is spectacularly bad and it is great fun.

Conclusion [4.0 out of 10 if you are looking for a good movie, 9 out of 10 if you love bad movies and want to laugh until you almost die for just over two hours]

So here is the deal as far as recommending the film goes. If you like bad movies and are a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 then you are in very good hands here. If you don’t like bad movies and are expecting something of genuine quality then you shouldn’t even look at the poster for this thing. That is really the breakdown. I thought it was very funny and I will probably go see it again and own it on blu-ray. But I am not even close to laughing with it.