Flocking to The Island

Director Michael Bay is big on overkill. For the West End premiere of his latest action movie The Island, the man behind Pearl Harbor and Armageddon deployed the heavy artillery.

There were his toprank stars, Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor, and co- stars Djimon Hounsou and Sean Bean. There was Bay himself and the producers, all talking about how great the script was.

This carpet-bombing of enthusiasm was partly designed to squash adverse advance publicity. In America, The Island got sniffy reviews and made "only" one tenth of its $120 million budget in its opening weekend. Then there was the issue of Johansson's bosoms.

The 20-year-old actress reportedly fought with Bay, 42, for the right to expose them in the one love scene. She lost, keeping her bra on to keep the film's PG certificate, but later complained her assets had been grossly inflated on the film's poster.

The united front at the Odeon Leicester Square was not just about damage limitation. However much they cost and however poorly reviewed, Bay's films have always, eventually, made money.

No, the constant harping on the superiority of the script was designed to hammer home the message that this was a blockbuster with brains, airing timely ideas about the moral implications of human cloning. Staggering out of the cinema two-plus hours later, it seemed to me the filmmakers and stars had been protesting a bit too much.

The Island is a typical Bay film. Like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, it's a simple story in big, bombastic clothes. It is polished and effective but the longer it goes on, the less it seems to say. It throws up ideas, then leaves them lying like cold sick while action sequences power mindlessly onward.

McGregor and Johansson play clones created by the very rich, kept physically perfect but emotionally stunted in a phony dystopian society until their pristine organs are needed (when they are told they've won a passport to "the island").

One day McGregor's Lincoln Six Echo, suffering unwarranted memories and doubts, drags Johansson's Jordan Two Delta outside and finds himself in Nevada. Despite having a supposed mental age of 15 (they seemed closer to 12 to me) they evade capture by killers sent by their creators, and even decide to strike back.

Most of this story is as frankly unbelievable as the idea of a star fighting a director for a nude scene.