It's writer Wes Tooke's first crack at a feature film. It shows. His screenplay would make a Baz Luhrmann film feel wooden, with a robotic script that brims with needless exposition.
There is so much "tell and also show" going on that Tooke has seemingly dropped his own 500-pound word bomb down the goddamn smokestack of this film. Fool of a Tooke!
To be fair, this heaving special effects-laden extravaganza is everything you'd expect from a director such as Roland Emmerich. He's the one responsible for patriotically gouging our brains out with Independence Day and White House Down among other "God Bless America" middle-of-the-road block-busters.
Midway is all that and more, and you'd be fairly naive if you went in expecting anything else. In fact, Emmerich's bombastic eye-candy may indeed be the perfect foil for Tooke's mechanical script—it's almost admirable how the duo have achieved peak-brain-dead-commercial-crap.
It's a "himbo" of a film; handsome to look at but not much above deck. Unfortunately, Midway treats it audience similarly.
Cast: Ed Skrein, Luke Evans, Woody Harrelson, Mandy Moore
Director: Roland Emmerich
Running time: 138 mins
Rating: M, (Violence, offensive language & content that may disturb)
Verdict: An overblown and corny theme-park ride.
