Battle: Los Angeles
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: March 11, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
37
METASCORE
Generally unfavorable reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
16
Negative:
13
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMar 10, 2011
The battle in Battle: Los Angeles is grab-the-armrest tense until the last seconds. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMar 10, 2011
Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianShawn LevyMar 11, 2011
The effect is to turn a brain-optional shoot-'em-up into a military recruiting commercial, which may not be an accident. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrMar 10, 2011
The Duke is not only name-checked in passing, but Eckhart (who's excellent) even bears a squinty resemblance by the final scenes. Read full review
63
Miami HeraldConnie OgleMar 10, 2011
It's the sort of film that's entertaining while you're in the theater. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliMar 9, 2011
Watching Battle Los Angeles is akin to observing someone else play a video game with top-notch production values. For a while, it's fun, but immersion is born of involvement. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzMar 10, 2011
Unfortunately, screenwriter Christopher Bertolini has given Eckhart and Liebesman a story so riddled with war-movie cliches that it contains almost nothing else. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerMar 12, 2011
When the military brass warns that "we're about to be colonized," you wonder if they mean to shut down the borders. It's probably not coincidental that the film is replete with Latino actors, or that one of the prime subplots involves a Hispanic father trapped behind enemy lines with his young son. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneMar 14, 2011
A lot more fun than bludgeoning, soul-draining follies like "Terminator Salvation" or the "Transformers" films, and, with a decisive trim, it could truly have fulfilled its brief as a bright, semi-abstract pop fantasy, at once excitable and disposable. Oddly, it did once exist in that form: in the first trailer. Read full review
50
SalonAndrew O'HehirMar 11, 2011
Reasonably effective. Read full review
50
Boxoffice MagazinePam GradyMar 11, 2011
The movie's true horror isn't the murderous extraterrestrials, but the lame script. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchKevin C. JohnsonMar 11, 2011
The so-so film isn't nearly as good as any of the movies that may have inspired it, or even its own knockout trailer. Read full review
50
USA TodayScott BowlesMar 10, 2011
You have to give director Jonathan Liebesman some points for sparing no shell casings or standing buildings to hustle us through the film's languorous two hours. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyMar 10, 2011
The city's skyline is blown to bits. Burning, broken, blackened bits. So if that's what you're in the mood for, that is what the film delivers, endlessly, but in that cheesy-campy way that can make a bad movie good fun. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie RickeyMar 10, 2011
That this is a cautionary tale about any people who would wage war in order to win the spoils of oil and water? Your guess is as good as mine. Read full review
50
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanMar 10, 2011
The biggest irony of this project is that it was made by a company that calls itself Original Film but has produced perhaps the least original movie of the year so far. Read full review
50
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallMar 10, 2011
What nags me about Battle Los Angeles is that Liebesman never realizes what he set up to happen after the fade-out. Read full review
50
Orlando SentinelRoger MooreMar 9, 2011
It's a film of noble sacrifice and "good deaths" but surprisingly few chuckles. Read full review
40
EmpireKim NewmanMar 12, 2011
Pretty much cardboard, down to the heroic patriotic speeches, and less distinctive even than last year's scarcely stellar "Skyline," which trashed the same city. Things blow up good and Eckhart is a classier actor than his role warrants, but we've all been here before. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovMar 10, 2011
Viewed as a war film, it's strictly standard run 'n' gun fare. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMar 9, 2011
The deadening and sometimes laughable litany of shouted military-style dialogue eventually pummels into submission any hope for fresh creative angles on this well-worn format. Read full review
40
VarietyBrian LowryMar 9, 2011
Mostly, this is the cinematic equivalent of a first-person shooter game, one where the Marines possess only slightly more personality than the faceless invaders. Read full review
38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick GroenMar 11, 2011
Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here. Read full review
38
New York PostLou LumenickMar 11, 2011
This silly extraterrestrial-invasion epic somehow manages the feat of making the destruction of La La Land seem tedious. Read full review
38
Washington PostMark JenkinsMar 10, 2011
H.G. Wells did it better. This movie spends so much yawn-inducing time on variations of the same combat scenario that its final showdown feels rushed. Read full review
33
The A.V. ClubScott TobiasMar 10, 2011
It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude. Read full review
30
Chicago ReaderMichael WilmingtonMar 12, 2011
Packed with gung ho war-movie clichés and subpar shock-and-awe visual effects, this terminally stupid sci-fi adventure pits an army of tentacled aliens piloting "Transformer"-style robots against a platoon of stoic warriors from the Fifth Marines' Second Battalion. Read full review
30
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMar 10, 2011
As it lurches from Act II to Act III, Battle: Loss Angeles reveals itself to be a lousy movie. Read full review
25
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanMar 10, 2011
Except for the relentless, jittery way that the film has been photographed, there's nothing of interest going on in it. It's all fractious guerrilla-newsreel "style" masquerading a void. Read full review
20
TimeRichard CorlissMar 12, 2011
The shaky-cam as used in "Cloverfield" and the Paul Greengrass "Bourne" films, and in TV shows from "NYPD Blue" to "24" to "The Office," is worse than amateurism; it's fake amateurism, the visual equivalent of a comedian pretending to have Parkinson's. Read full review
20
Time OutDavid FearMar 10, 2011
Fess up: You want to see Los Angeles get blowed up real good, and it's a measure of this movie's incompetence that it can't even deliver that vicarious thrill properly. Read full review
20
MovielineMichelle OrangeMar 10, 2011
It really is just sensory bombardment, and in two dimensions you have even less of a grasp of what's happening and of what you're looking at than the poor bastards on-screen. Read full review
20
Village VoiceNick SchagerMar 9, 2011
Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive courtesy of a cornball motivational speech by Eckhart's hero. Read full review
12
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertMar 9, 2011
Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails. Read full review
0
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierMar 10, 2011
This one isn't original, or even bearable. By its thudding end, audiences may wish they could be zapped from the theater to escape the buzzing in their ears. Read full review
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