The Island: Critic Reviews

The Island begins with a whimper of interest as a cool-hued, cautionary exploration of the ethics of cloning, and ends, in a hail of product placement, with a dumb bang.

This lavish, exhaustingly kinetic film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be.

Despite all the firepower, the movie is only sporadically exciting.

If you find yourself at The Island I have only three words of advice: Vote yourself off.

As pretty, very human stars, McGregor and Johansson put the main sizzle into The Island, since we've seen this plotline, and this Brave New World, in better sci-fi films.

Frequently thrilling.

For Bay, restraint means not dropping a fireball on a large urban center within the first act.

Theaters showing Michael Bay's futuristic thriller The Island won't be offering any money-back guarantees. They just need to be sure they have enough popcorn on hand.

Its tale was more tame and thoughtful when Steven Spielberg, having done the related Artificial Intelligence, pitched it to Bay. But Bay, being Bay, punched it up, hiring script doctors to mainline some action.

Michael Bay has made a movie that makes you ponder matters more meaningful than how cool that last car chase looked.

Like the first half of Minority Report, Bay's movie creates an entire new world, making us believe it and dread it at the same time.

The first half of Michael Bay's new film is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work. Whether they work together is a good question.

Classic Bay, except it's missing the crass director's fine-tuned rhythm, his feel for adrenaline, his breakneck edits and sense of humor.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills if it weren't so shamelessly dumb.

As futuristic nightmares go, The Island is pretty appealing.

The Island seems like the movie Michael Bay was born to make.

A high-concept movie that director Michael Bay turns into Bad Boys III: Send in the Clones.

Since Michael Bay never knows when enough is enough, every chase is restaged over and again and the narrative matrix is as simplistic as it is repetitive.

In his latest exercise in sensory overkill, producer-helmer Michael Bay takes on the weighty moral conundrums of human cloning, resolving them in a storm of bullets, car chases and more explosions than you can shake a syringe at.

[Bay's] best film since The Rock.

Bay's action is flashy enough to compensate for some of the shortcomings of the script.

If The Island qualifies as cheese deluxe even by Michael Bay standards, it's because it's the only one in his lavishly decadent oeuvre that actually pretends to trade in ideas.

Like War of the Worlds, The Island is essentially a chase movie where the actors' job is to look good and keep moving.

The Island is nothing so dull as a total failure. But it has enough surprises up its clingy white sleeve to make you wish it were better.

Calling The Island a 'popcorn, old-fashioned summer movie' is fair, but it's also sad, since it could have been more. But movies that aim low rarely achieve any kind of altitude.