Dangerous Toys: Terrible film adaptations that are nothing more than child’s play

Battleship [2012]

Damn, where to start with this one. We’d probably throw this one into the “interesting failure” category, and we’re not sure if this won’t become a camp classic 20 or 30 years down the road, but man, what a stupid idea for a movie. Director Peter Berg (Patriots Day) decided to take the classic board game and transform it into a story of survival in the face of an alien invasion in the middle of a bunch of naval war games. Taylor Kitsch continued his streak of flops (this came out right after John Carter and right before Savages) and pretty much killed his chances of ever appearing on the big screen as a leading man again, and Rihanna’s performance in the movie has been rightly torn to shreds by the hounds of the internet. Pretty much the only person to escape this movie unscathed was Liam Neeson, whose presence in this movie was (we think) the reason most of the tickets were sold for this movie in the first place. Berg’s hard on for the Navy poked all of the viewers in the eye, and obscured some of the fun aspects about this movie (the aliens shoot the pegs from the board game into the ships they attack) with the red, white and blue. And this movie would be on the list just for leaving out the “you sunk my battleship” line out of the mouths of its characters. In lieu of a trailer, here’s Peter Berg freaking out at an Israeli journalist when this movie was released.