The Island

Scarlett Johansson can handle a gun - and even pout when she runs - in The Island. She stars with Ewan McGregor.

(Herald rating: * * *)

The trouble with Michael Bay directing a science fiction movie is that he knows too much about the wrong science. The Island is a movie about human cloning. Well, that's how it starts anyway - and sometimes remembers later.

But the man who brought us The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys one and two and Pearl Harbor isn't a eugenics kind of guy. No, as those films have shown, Bay's only scientific pursuit is ... well, the pursuit. And how to make stuff blow up as impressively and frequently as possible - all the better if it's in a chase scene.

Now, how do you get plenty of high-speed pursuits and fireworks into a movie about human cloning? Easy, says Bay. Simply reverse the equation: You put human cloning into a movie about chases and things going boom and everything else will take care of itself. Heck, you won't be able to hear yourself think, anyway.

And when you've got Ewan McGregor pushing train axles off the back of a truck on a Los Angeles freeway at the gun-toting ex-commandos hired to send him and fellow clone Scarlett Johansson back to the lab, who's got time for bioethics anyway?

Yep, one day there will be a really great sci-fi film about nanotechnology and all that stuff. But until then let's have this one with the hover-cycles and the miraculous escape from the falling skyscraper sign.

The Island starts off in a world resembling everything from THX 1138 to The Matrix to Logan's Run. It begins in a facility where thousands of clones have been housed in the belief they are the last survivors of some environmental catastrophe, when, in fact, they are but spare parts for rich folks who ordered them.

But once McGregor's Lincoln Six-Echo and Johansson's Jordan Two-Delta have escaped, the movie swaps its labcoat - or in their case white lycra tracksuits - for motorcycle leathers and never looks back.

Of course, facility director Dr Merrick (Bean) isn't happy about two of his products being on the loose, especially as he's told his clients their "insurance policies" are only in a vegetative state - not walking, talking doppelgangers.

So he hires a squad led by former mercenary Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) to track the pair down in Los Angeles, where Lincoln is trying to find his original and expose the truth.

There are some nice touches around the edges. Steve Buscemi is hilarious as a facility worker who gets tied up in the escape and there are some amusing moments to do with the pair's naivety about the outside world - they've been educated to the level of 15-year-olds and their memories are implanted. Which perhaps explains why Lincoln drives like a teenager.

The facility is a wonder of antiseptic design, too. Sort of iPodworld.

Hilarious also is the level of product placement, but it makes for a strangely memorable scene - Jordan recognises her original's luminous face in a Calvin Klein billboard. Bet her agent had to stay up late working out the percentages on that one. But in her first action film she shows she's got what it takes - to pout and run at the same time.

That action is expertly choreographed.

But as Bay racks up the mayhem it becomes exhausting rather than exhilarating, especially as the implausibility-o-meter gets stuck in the red.

As it heads to the big showdown it has discarded most everything that made it promising at the start.

It might stand out as a rare film in this blockbuster season in that it comes from original material and comes delivered under-hyped, but it ends up feeling like a clone whose test-tube has been shaken a little too hard.

CAST: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean
DIRECTOR: Michael Bay
RATING: M (violence, offensive language)
RUNNING TIME: 136 mins
SCREENING: Village Hoyts Berkeley Cinemas