‘The Island’ doesn’t live up to its potential

In less than a decade, Michael Bay has become a brand name almost as recognizable (if not as respected) as Disney and Spielberg.

Whether Bay is directing “Pearl Harbor” or “Armageddon” or his new science-fiction epic, “The Island,” you know exactly what to expect: (a) a plot that recycles ideas from better movies, (b) a love story so unapologetically banal that only George Lucas could rival it, (c) chase sequences that defy logic but are usually loud enough to silence any objections, and (d) explosives that blow up real good.

“The Island” is more interesting than most Bay movies because it deals rather cleverly with several timely issues, including cloning and its promised medical benefits. The chief villain is an unprincipled scientist (Sean Bean) with a God complex who declares that it’s all going to work out because he’ll be able to cure leukemia in children within two years. He’s like a stem-cell advocate who’s lost his bearings, though the movie, which is set in 2019, doesn’t entirely shut him down for his beliefs.

Quick facts Starring: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi Director: Michael Bay Run time: 2 hours, 7 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13

It’s his greedy methods that warrant condemnation. In his factory in the desert, he’s creating expendable duplicates of wealthy people who pay as much as $5 million for their clones’ organ parts, in hopes of living 50 or 60 years longer. He’s also involved in a lethal propaganda campaign, brainwashing the clones into thinking they’re winning a lottery when they’re really being put to sleep and robbed of their hearts, lungs and livers.

If you remember what happened to the replicants in “Blade Runner,” or the fate of the reborns in “Seconds” or the 30-year-olds in “Logan’s Run” — or if you recall the ingredients of “Soylent Green” — you won’t be surprised by many of the script’s twists. This territory has been thoroughly explored before, in movies that were often more persuasive and more poignant.

Still, the writers, Caspian Tredwell-Owen (“Beyond Borders”) and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who previously teamed up on “Xena: Warrior Princess”), provide a richly comic role for Steve Buscemi and plenty of fish-out-of-water comedy for the stars, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

They may lack chemistry as lovers, but as naive escapees from Bean’s factory, helped along on their journey to Los Angeles by the cynical but generous Buscemi, they’re often very funny. Confused by jargon they don’t understand, suppressed by a corporate culture that deliberately denies their sexuality and punishes “proximity,” they’re like a couple of precocious children trying to adjust to an alien society’s norms.

When McGregor meets up with his sponsor/double, who looks and sounds just like him except that he has a Scottish accent (they both think the cloned American President is “an idiot”), “The Island” briefly flirts with political satire.

There’s also an unsettling hint of the Holocaust in the ultimate destination of the clones, and a suggestion of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the scenes of objects flying through Los Angeles skyscrapers. Unfortunately, just when they’re starting to have an emotional impact, the explosions and chases take on a Bay-style sameness and conventionality, and the movie stops just short of its potential.

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