The beginning takes place in the vicinity of an Orwellian dystopia, where a closely monitored populace ("Sodium Excess Detected," reads out a urinal at a morning pee) must live in regimented drudgery and sterile isolation, under stricter rules against intergender "proximity" than at a Catholic-school dance, and with the desperate hope to hit the lottery and a free pass to the titular paradise, "nature's last remaining pathogen-free zone." Roughly forty-five minutes into the movie, the Island will turn out to be, along with much else, a mirage, a figment. Further revelations trickle out, but the main business of the next hour and a half is a chase, in gaudy music-video visuals, with low angles and wide angles, flash pans and smash cuts, shafts of light and blasts of glare, plumes of steam and showers of sparks. The installation of Michael Bay in the director's chair is your assurance that the slow start will not bar you from repulsively overscaled action à la Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, only bigger, and with more miraculous, or more slapsticky, strokes of luck. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are the two fugitives whose ostensible goal is to hang on to their humanity. But both of them had to let go of that, together with their "indie" credentials, at the front gate. Sean Bean, Djimoun Housou, Steve Buscemi. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd