INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) **1/2 Finally, a sensible argument for unbridled and unchecked defense spending. “Yeah, yeah, but what'll we do if the aliens come and they have 50 foot long tentacles-lots of ‘em-and they have force fields around their spaceships and they want to abuse all of our natural resources instead of letting us do it?” Republican aliens, yes, the mind boggles. There are familiar faces, but not much acting to speak of. Judd Hirsch is very funny as the lovable old Jewish dad, and Will Smith gets what good lines there are. Will hits some of ‘em on the nose, and he smiles when he says ‘em all, it's got to be difficult to try not to like the guy. More important, he has absolute credibility as this tough street dude who is absolutely relentless in his pursuit of what he wants, because you know that's who he is. The plot's ok but so corny and conventional that it doesn't even rise to the level of derivative. The special effects are expensive, and occasionally borderline convincing. We've seen it all before. I don't usually like my mediocre movies to last well into third hour, but this one...after about two hours they just break down and admit how goofy the whole thing is, and throw away any pretension of being anything different, or particularly, better. At that point it begins to work. They dump in entirely unnecessary scenes so schmaltzy as to shame soap opera writers, Will and Jeff Goldblum become the most improbable (and hopelessly pompous) of buddies, anything however vaguely resembling reason or common sense is thrown to the cosmic wind. It gets fun. I like that.
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