- 7
...a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 6
...gets a lot of things right. It's the wrong bits that will determine what you ultiamtely think of the movie itself.
—Jason McKiernan filmcritic.com
- 6
...full of intense action but little in the way of character development.
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 5
...buckle(s) from cardboard protagonists and a script that echoes a Marine recruitment video.
—Scott Bowles USA Today
- 5
...inspires some shock and awe with CGI effects, but misfires with stock characters and cheesoid dialogue.
—Matt Stevens E!
- 4
It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.
—Scott Tobias Onion AV Club
- 4
...very much in the tradition of those old World War II films you find on late-night cable with rickety fighter planes engaged in long skirmishes that you can't follow all that well except you know a few good men are trying to save the day. But with less story and instead of Germans or Japanese for hostiles, we get hordes of vengeful aliens, their monstrous UFOs choking the L.A. skies like rush hour on the 405.
—Betsy Sharkey Los Angeles Times
- 4
...a silly extraterrestrial-invasion epic ...
—Lou Lumenick New York Post
- 3
...stupid and very, very loud.
—Brian Lowry Variety
- 3
...so inept it's exhausting.
—Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly
- 3
...[Jonathan] Liebesman directs...as if he were having a violent seizure, wedding whiplash faux-war-documentary aesthetics to a Michael Bay cocktail of ooh-rah military romanticism, quick-stroke melodrama, and seesawing CG mayhem.
—Nick Schager LA Weekly
- 3
...[Jonathan] Liebesman directs...as if he were having a violent seizure, wedding whiplash faux-war-documentary aesthetics to a Michael Bay cocktail of ooh-rah military romanticism, quick-stroke melodrama, and seesawing CG mayhem.
—Nick Schager Village Voice
- 3
...a lousy movie.
—A. O. Scott New York Times
- 3
If Mystery Science Theater 3000 was still around, the gang would want to put this one in its sights pronto.
—Todd McCarthy Hollywood Reporter
- 2
Battle: Los Angeles is noisy, violent, ugly and stupid. Its manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of its makers, who don't even try to make it more than senseless chaos. Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times