Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011)

The American public's appetite for gung-ho military porn has become deeply frustrated with the lack of a decent enemy to fight on a traditional battlefield, with those cowardly terrorists choosing to hide in holes instead of submitting to duking it out mano-a-mano. So they're now having to invent opponents, and alien invasion is the option of last resort.
It's still depressing, though, to come across a dollar mountain burner that makes Independence Day look like a paragon of feasibility and subtlety. Naturally, you expect the platoon of tokenistically multiethnic grunts to go tortuously through the lock'n'loady motions and male bonding exercises, but there's an unforgivable absence of any tension in the interminable demolition by meaty munitions of piles of concrete, cars and hopelessly unimaginative CGI monsters. And even the strategic aspects of the battle hit new peaks of illogicality, with the Transformer/Predator-lite bogeymen for some unfathomable reason choosing to engage our brave heroes on the ground like insurgents instead of using just a smidgeon of whatever technology might have actually got them here in the first place.
It's not good when you start giving consideration to the campness of the execrable Battlefield Earth in comparison to the square-jawed humourlessness on display here. It's staggeringly dull.

3/10