Godzilla combines the excitement of moving pictures with the thrill of synchronized sound, and the abject disappointment of biting into a peanut-butter-and-wasp sandwich.

To be fair, it’s not exactly a bad movie. It’s just thoroughly mediocre by every stretch of imagination. It’s plodding, dull, and lethargic, horrifically paced, edited together by someone with no sense of structure or rising tension. It’s full of bland, slack-jawed characters devoid of emotion or any sort of purpose. It – okay, come to think of it, it is actually kind of a bad movie.

However, the trailer for the movie, which was clearly cut together by someone with considerably more talent than whoever cut together the actual film, implies that the movie will have three things:

1. Bryan Cranston
2. The Statue of Liberty getting destroyed
3. Tension

It has none.

Okay, technically, it does have Bryan Cranston in an extended cameo before his character is unceremoniously dispatched in the first fifteen minutes when some shit falls on him and you think, whoops, guess you should have stepped to the left instead of the right. The movie is then passed to his son, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a soldier with a wife and son he may or may not care about. It’s hard to tell because his facial expression never changes.

After a lot of walking and talking and family drama and people holding clipboards while staring into computer screens, the film’s big first action sequence opens up in Hawaii where there’s some wanton destruction and then Godzilla shows up, big as life, and it’s kinda odd, because most thrilling high-tension monster movies tend to draw out the reveal a bit more to jack up the anticipation and make the appearance that much more exciting. But okay, maybe the director wanted to just get right down to it and then have the rest of the movie be gloriously amazing balls-to-the-wall violence and destruction on a Katrina-esque scale.

I could support that. But instead, for the majority of the rest of the movie, the director continues the proverbial monster cocktease, concealing him just out of frame or hidden behind closing doors which kind’ve loses its point once the audience has already seen a gigantic fucking wide-angle shot of Godzilla punching a hole through a Honolulu high-rise.

Fortunately, that doesn’t matter too much, because the second half of the movie is atrociously paced, cutting rapidly back and forth between nothing happening, off-screen wanton destruction, nothing happening, Godzilla fighting M.O.T.U.s before disappearing into a giant cloud of dust because their CGI budget could only afford an actual Godzilla vs. bad guys fight to last for about 35 seconds at the film’s climax.

I recommend watching something better, like Pacific Rim.