Skyline

Director: Colin & Greg Strause (2010)

Starring: Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, David Zayas, Turk from Scrubs.

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

One fine morning in LA, some aliens arrive and begin abducting citizens. With a giant sky vacuum cleaner and some pretty blue lights, hundreds of thousands of humans are sucked into the sky and the depths of the alien ships therein. Not, shockingly, for anal probing, but something even stupider.

Talking of stupid, Skyline's cast consists of a lot of stupid characters played by actors who played other stupid characters in equally stupid TV shows and movies. Eric Balfour plays a man called Jarrod, whose stupid (long) face and stupid hair matches his stupid name. And Turk from off've Scrubs plays Jarrod's friend, who is also stupid and drives a fucking convertible when aliens are sucking people up into the sky. Scottie Thompson and Brittany Daniel play the respective stupid girlfriends, whilst Dexter's David Zayas makes a neat appearance to play the sole character who isn't a complete idiot in the movie.

Why the long face?

At least three times our intrepid heroes are shown struggling with bloody doors. And the first of those happens after the dipshits manage to lock themselves on a roof. The characters in Skyline are more witless than Justin Bartha in The Hangover. And considering that this is allegedly a serious role, Turk manages to show less intelligence than his character from Scrubs. Skyline is a movie so stupid that if you type 'skyline' into google, the first few pages of image results you'll get is for stupid sports cars for stupid people. I'd imagine that the cast of Skyline all drive Skylines.

But stupidity is apparently epidemic in LA. It's an invasion that should be defeated with a pair of sunglasses (much of the aliens' weaponry depends on their victims looking 'into the light') and yet the city is mostly destroyed within a matter of days.

But there are some good action sequences in Skyline, and the aliens do look pretty cool (if reminiscent of those from Independence Day). The final quarter owes a lot to both Spielberg's War Of The Worlds and the more recent District 9. The CGI isn't the best ever, but it comes fast and loose enough that you won't really notice. David Zayas gets at least one good moment to be badass and there's plenty of schadenfreude in watching the more dipshitty of the dipshits die as they do. In its final quarter or so, Skyline starts to get pretty good

And then gets very, very stupid again. Videogame stupid, crossed with Michael Bay stupid and then multiplied by its own particular brand of stupid; Skyline is, well, stupid.