The Island 

The Island tells the story of Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Johansson), two clones who escape the not-so idyllic facility where they live after they discover its true nature. They then spend the majority of the remainder of the film being chased by the bad guys in a mildly futuristic landscape.

With such wham-bam escapades as Armageddon, Bad Boys and The Rock on his CV, director Michael Bay has made a career out of sun-drenched action scenes featuring beautiful people. But his films, while technically impressive, have never been as cool as those made by an action master like Tony Scott (Top Gun, The Last Boy Scout, Crimson Tide), whose style Bay is clearly influenced by.

Ahead of time, The Island didn't look like it would deviate too much from Bay's previous work. It promised an extremely unoriginal cloning plot plus a bunch of chase scenes. The only selling point seemed to be its admittedly cool cast - in addition to the two talented leads, we get Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile, Sin City); Djimon Hounsou (Constantine, Amistad), Sean Bean (LOTR) and the great Steve Buscemi (The Sopranos, Ghost World).

Also, there has been much made of how The Island represents McGregor's first big action flick leading role - if you don't count a certain independently produced trilogy of space movies that is.

Despite this considerably "blah" build up, I am happy to report that The Island is a sweet slice of slickly produced Hollywood entertainment with several very cool action scenes.

It's not the answer to any of our problems or even particularly memorable, but it does its job reasonably well and provides some above average visual spectacle.

Michael Bay has always tried to up the ante on big action scenes in his movies (just witness the freeway chase scene in Bad Boys II), but they've always felt a little hollow. Impressively big, sure, but just not cool. In The Island, they are cool. It's hard to articulate why. They're still drenched in that trademark Michael Bay glow, but they're just...cooler.

Maybe it's because they principally involve a raft of nicely designed futuristic vehicles (the flying motorbikes are particularly nice). Maybe it's because McGregor and Johansson's acting abilities ground the ridiculousness of what's going on around them. Maybe it's the lack of hardcore saccharine patriotism that permeates Bay's early work. Or maybe it's because there's lots of nice "falling" action, which I'm always a sucker for. It probably shouldn't be analysed too much. Whatever the case, it bodes well for Bay's next project - a live action Transformers film.

There is a certain novelty to seeing such atypical action film stars such as McGregor and Johansson in a film like this, and the former has some fun scenes opposite himself, but the script doesn't offer them any especially memorable lines.

As mentioned previously, the plot is decidedly derivative with few to no original concepts at all. While it would've been nice to take in some genuine intrigue, this doesn't detract in any major way from the predominantly shallow joys of the film.

There are gaping plot holes and a disgusting level of product placement (being an imprisoned clone ain't so bad - you get to play X-Box!) , but if  you're simply looking for a little popcorn fun, you'll most likely find yourself forgiving the film these increasingly frequent cinematic crimes.

In an era of blandly overproduced action flicks, it seems like an achievement when one comes along that is actually watchable, let alone kind of fun. Under this thinking, The Island is very much worth checking out.

Recommended.

Dominic Corry