You should know what you’re getting when you sit down to watch a behemoth, radioactive lizard frolic around the Pacific rim. I had a hunch; I should have listened to it.

My wife and I hadn’t been out on a date in months. She wanted to see the new Godzilla movie, mostly because of Bryan Cranston. He wouldn’t jump from Breaking Bad into a ridiculously stupid movie, right? Right?

We dropped the big boys at the neighbor’s, but we kept the baby because my wife has a strange fetish with movie theaters. She’s not happy unless she can sneak in McDonald’s food or brazenly walk in with a tiny human who could go off at any moment. I drew the line at McDonald’s being part of our date.

The baby was incredibly quiet through the movie, except for a brief period when his foot got stuck under the arm rest. He did not infringe on anyone’s enjoyment of the film. I wish I could say the same thing for the film.

I don’t know why people are always trying to make a better Godzilla movie. I don’t know why we need a better Godzilla movie. A man in a lizard suit stomping on model army tanks is all I’ve ever wanted from Godzilla, and that was accomplished to perfection 60 years ago.

Just roll in some toy army vehicles and we’ve got ourselves a movie.

I would issue a spoiler alert for what comes next, but the real spoiler will be seeing the movie theater charge show up on the credit card statement.

My wife felt cheated that Mr. Cranston was in less than half of the movie. She figured they must have run out of money to pay his huge salary at that point. My theory is that he saw the rest of the script and bailed. I have yet to figure out what his character added to the plot anyway, other than a crazy old man who turned out to be right, but so what? Crazy people are always right in movies.

“Oh my God! Is that the rest of the script? Run!” (Image: Warner Bros.)

My wife is much more charitable toward films than I am, but when the lights came up, her first words were, “Want to know all the problems I have with that movie?”

I don’t even remember all the problems. I do recall that after an EMP wave fried all the electronics in San Francisco, preventing the heroes from driving into the city, they were able to hotwire a boat at the dock with no problem. Yup, it fired right up, with spotlights on and everything.

Oh, and then there was the ultra-powerful atomic weapon that was detonated about 10 feet beyond the Golden Gate Bridge with no consequences to the city. Too bad they dragged all those puny Cold War atom bombs all the way out to remote islands. They could have used those for a fireworks show at Candlestick Park.

This would have been the worst Bryan Cranston movie ever, had he actually been in it. But that’s okay; we’ll probably have another date night next year.