Great trailer. The first one. Not the second, all about kissing and girls and stuff. No, the one where fucking big rocks blow New York back to the Stone Age and smart talking guys with big dicks sling-shot space shuttles off of the moon. That's Armageddon. There's none of that touchy-feely asteroid crap Deep Impact tried-on. Arses are for kicking, and this is a film that thankfully lives up to its billing: a street trader's display of plastic Godzillas are trashed inside the first five minutes. Suck on that.

Not that you'd expect different from uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and hard-on hardass helmer Bay - the pair who foisted super-cool geek-vs-psycho actioner The Rock on us a couple of years back. Armageddon, though, is in another league: it's The Dirty Dozen Do Apollo 13, realised with all the subtlety of last year's fabulous testosterone-fest Con-Air.

The premise is a piece of piss. A hunk of rock the size of Texas - "a planet killer" - is Earthbound with a vengeance. Its debris-field is already on recon, laying combustible waste to vast swathes of the planet. NASA, in the shape of Billy Bob Thornton, swiftly grasps the salient facts: mankind has just days to live; and that only way to prevent "basically the worst parts of The Bible" is to split this mother in two. With a nuclear warhead. Drilled 800 feet straight down. Cue Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), the best deepcore driller in the business, who signs aboard the shuttle with his misbegotten rig crew at his side.

Armageddon is a 150 minutes (of which about an hour feels like credits) of Boys' Own heroics par excellence. Only two members of a huge cast actually give anything like performances, with Thornton rather touching as the crippled and crumpled controller, and a terrific Steve Buscemi playing his balls off as Willis' comic foil, Rockhound. Elsewhere the likes of pretty-boy Ben Affleck, Will Patton, Peter Stomare, Keith David and William Fitchner throw themselves at this (literal) blockbusting rubbish with admirable gusto. Only Liv Tyler, as Willis' daughter and Affleck's main squeeze, gets in the way. A film so in love with itself scarcely needs a love interest.

And of course the whole thing is scorchingly pro-US. The second half positively drips in the Star and Stripes, but J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Hensleigh's admirable script never loses sight of its own inherent absurdity, always willing to undercut itself through Buscemi's quick quips, by having no less than Charlton Heston narrate the apocalyptic opening, or by flinging in an entirely gratuitous backhander to Dr. Strangelove.

Sure, it's too loud, much too long, far too expensive, too rabidly patriotic, and much much too much fun: the sort of movie where poor old Paris gets it in the neck twenty minutes from the end just for the sheer hell of it. Cinema in italics, and easily the best blockbuster of an otherwise limp summer season.