But it was supposed to be a three-hour tour ... a three-hour tour!: "The Island"

Listen, I'm not going to sit here and say that Michael Bay gets a bad rap. His movies mostly suck ass, and his scenes are about a subtle as Courtney Love in a convent. But you have to admit the first "Bad Boys" was mildly entertaining, and "The Rock" was even fun. Good dialogue? Nope, just shoot-shoot, bang-bang, crash-crash, and that's not bad all of the time.

Of course, Bay didn't quit after those two decent efforts, instead unleashing upon the world the unholy trinity of "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor" and "Bad Boys II." So I considered "The Island" carefully ... Bay's recent string of noisy crap vs. a promising plot and a couple of real actors with a capital A: Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

Maybe "promising plot" is a little generous, since this turned out to be a curious amalgam of "Logan's Run," "The Sixth Day" and, from way back, "Coma." None of those is a classic, but all had their interesting points, and "The Island" starts off intelligently enough. Shedding his Jedi robes, McGregor ("Eye of the Beholder") plays a guy named Lincoln Six Echo who lives in a sealed off community after most of the world's population has been wiped out by some kind of "contamination."

He's friends with Scarlettttttt Johansssssssson, who has lost some baby fat and picked up blond tresses since "Lost in Translation." For the most part, it's an improvement, and she gets foxier as the movie progresses. But let me share something that has sort of ruined Scarlett for me: She has a "butthole mouth." That's what my uncle said about her round, full lips, and no matter how she bats her eyes and slinks around, I keep coming back to that. No need to thank me.

Within this society, the goal is to be picked to go to the Island, a contamination-free zone outside city walls. Alas, the Island doesn't exist, as Lincoln learns the "winners" actually are killed and harvested for their newborn babies, organs ... anything usable. That's because they're clones, not real humans. (I ruin nothing by sharing this, since the trailer spells this out.)

All this discovery unfolds nicely enough, but when Ewan and Scarlett escape to the outside, Bay finally cuts loose with his old habits. We get chasing, we get shooting, we get crashing, we get one-liner ... -ing, I guess. Some of this is OK, but it all adds up to too much of the usual slam-bang, Bay-blowing-crap-up stuff when a little restraint and a little more thought might have helped.

That said, the second half isn't a total loss. There's the requisite Steve Buscemi flake character, and Djimon Hounsou -- whose named I still can't pronounce -- does as much as he can with a threadbare role. As for those loud chase scenes, we even get a few laughs, from bad guys getting clotheslined by low-hanging objects to a scene in which our heroes survive a fall from a skyscraper -- something so unbelievable you almost have to give Bay credit for having the balls to include it. It's almost like he's telling the audience, "Hey, I had people try to blow up a meteor. This is nothing, folks."