I'm willing to forgive Michael Bay for Bad Boys and The Rock. Both movies are stylish and, in their own way, cool. Bad Boys suffers from a horribly recycled plot, but the charisma of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence help to sell it. The Rock is nearly equally rehashed and certainly as goofy, but it has Nicholas Cage, Sean Connery and Ed Harris and not even Bay can ruin that chemistry.

There is only so far you can go without substance, however, and Armageddon is the proof of that.

Let me back up a little.

Armageddon tells the story of an asteroid on a collision course for Earth. This thing is big (the size of Texas, we're told) and only 18 days away when it's finally spotted -- by a white trash astronomer, no less, who manages to determine that this rock will hit the Earth without bothering with the trivial details, such as actually plotting its course.

Don't plan on logic and plausibility helping you out as both are cheerfully tossed out the window of this visual train wreck. It makes Deep Impact, the other "stellar object speeding toward Earth to doom us all" film that year, look like a NASA training video. Bay seems to be trying to hide the idiocy in this film by cutting from scene to scene at a pace that suggests he's auditioning to be the poster boy for Attention Deficit Disorder.

I knew this movie was in trouble when I began concentrating more on counting clichés than on the plot (I believe my count started about two minutes into the film). And still, after being bombarded with cliché after cliché after cliché, I sat in stunned disbelief when the ultimate suspense crutch - the "which wire to cut on the bomb" scenario - was thrust into story. Keep in mind that this bomb is not a terrorist device, but rather one of the tools of the film's heroes. The only possible conclusion I can come to is that of the nine scriptwriters for this film, only one of them understood that it was actually about an asteroid.

The rest of the story is simple, if not absurd: Our only hope for survival is to send someone to blow up the asteroid. Naturally, Bruce Willis must go - who else would you get to blow something up real good? Willis and his crew of oil drillers are given crash (no pun intended) astronaut training, presumably because it's easier to teach someone to be an astronaut in 18 days than it is to teach someone to drill a hole. We're actually expected to believe that the same group of NASA engineers who send up a Space Shuttle just about every time you turn around can't read a blueprint well enough to assemble a drill. Golly. Maybe NASA should hire Willis' team to build that space station for us, too.

At the end of training, the team is sent off into space, that most dangerous of environments where gravity depends solely on the needs of the script and space stations explode just to make sure that an audience already suffering from input overload never gets a moment to catch its breath.

Along the way we get: a good ol' boy who heads NASA (and always wanted to be an astronaut but is crippled); a girl pining for her boyfriend in space; a love-hate relationship between two heroes; a kooky group of misfits that always "get the job done"; a father estranged from his wife and kids, but just might redeem himself if he can save the world; a stereotypical Russian; an explosion every two minutes; a seemingly cool-headed astronaut who goes crazy and tries to kill everyone; and last, but certainly not least, the infamous and previosuly mentioned scene where everyone's fate rests on which wire to cut to disarm the bomb. But that's just scratching the surface. Perhaps the true motivation behind Armageddon was to make it the visual dictionary for bad clichés.

I think the only thing missing is having one of the characters "talked in" to land the shuttle. Oh well, I guess you can't think of everything. Then again, perhaps Bay and crew were hoping to save something for a sequel.