It wasn't just Red Riding Hood that got dragged over the coals by the critical mass this week -- fellow Friday release Battle: Los Angeles is apparently pretty bad, too. As Movieline's own Michelle Orange wrote, Battle: Los Angeles is such a slave to the shaky cam aesthetic that it may as well have been shot by her iPhone-using mother. Ouch. Though considering the all-time pan Roger Ebert wrote for Battle, perhaps Apple-based cinematography and wooden characters are only the beginning. Ahead, the nine most blistering sentences in Ebert's half-star review.
9. "Battle: Los Angeles is noisy, violent, ugly and stupid."
8. "Its manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of its makers, who don't even try to make it more than senseless chaos."
7. "Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words 'science' and 'fiction,' and the hyphen in between them."
6. "The aliens are hilarious."
5. "They seem to be animal/machine hybrids with automatic weapons growing from their arms, which must make it hard to change the baby."
4. "The only characters I remember having four sentences in a row are the anchors on cable news."
3. "[The alien battleships are] aggressively ugly and cluttered, the product of a planet where design has not been discovered and even the Coke bottles must look like pincushions."
2. "Generations of filmmakers devoted their lives to perfecting techniques that a director like Jonathan Liebesman is either ignorant of, or indifferent to."
1. (tie) "Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you've been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart."
· 'Battle: Los Angeles' Review [RogerEbert.com]