ARMAGEDDON (59)

Directed by: Michael Bay

Starring: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler

The Pitch: When an asteroid threatens Earth with extinction, a team of goofy hard-hats have to blast off into space, drill into the asteroid, blow it up with explosives and - gosh! - save the world.

Theo Sez: "It's...unbelievable," exclaims Tyler ; "Actually ma'am," replies Thornton, straight-faced, "this is as real as it gets". We-e-ell, let's not get carried away - but this cheerfully improbable action movie is actually a lot of fun, even if cheerfulness isn't perhaps the most appropriate mood for the end of the world (though better this than the maudlin melodramas of DEEP IMPACT). In terms of attitudes it's a real late-90s time-capsule, featuring the most unabashedly conservative hero in ages (gun-happy, super-patriotic, anti-environmentalist, controlling parent), lots of anti-intellectualism - satirising the same kind of egghead scientist who'd have been the hero 40 years ago - and American triumphalism at its most blatant (the scene where the US President addresses the entire world is the equivalent of those Victorian maps with everything painted British-Empire-red - and will no doubt look just as obsolete one day) ; but it's also the perfect example of this genre in its comfortable middle age, lavishing its mega-budget with a kind of casual largesse and acting as a Big Top for all kinds of acts - not just the big-bang testosterone stuff but also out-and-out comedy, a (sappy) love story, APOLLO 13 techie-talk and the (creditably) undiluted flakiness of Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson. The extended climax (the mission itself), in which everything possible seems to go wrong, is Boys' Own adventure at its most satisfying - mostly because, as such things should (but rarely do), it puts the emphasis on problem-solving rather than explosions (the one thing our heroes can't do is blast their way out of trouble). Some of the nick-of-time escapes admittedly seem (in retrospect) to be cheating slightly, and the whole certainly lacks urgency (middle-age brings a tendency to flabbiness) - but then urgency isn't the only pleasure to be had from this kind of movie : there's also the pleasure of piled-up abundance, different kinds of things constantly going on. It's like playing with a giant train-set - and they rarely come with as many extras as this one.