Reviews

Pretty much everything about this movie is stupid. The plot doesn't even begin to make sense. The film is just a grab-bag of cliches strung together with some of the worst dialogue in cinematic history. The lead turns in a thoroughly wooden performance, although in fairness even the best actor would struggle to make anything of the material she's given.

Everyone involved will probably want to take this off their resumes, but none more than Daryl Hannah, a first-rate actress who deserves better than this. She spends a large part of the film looking devastated and clutching a stuffed monkey, and her visible despair at finding herself in this absolute turkey of a movie is perhaps the only convincing or relatable thing in the whole film.

There is nothing here that couldn't be fixed with a better screenplay, one or two original ideas, shrewder casting choices, dialogue that didn't sound as if it had been translated into English from the original Chinese subtitles by a native Polish speaker, and a director who hadn't graduated from the "straight to video" school of filmmaking. As it is, though, it's a hot mess, but not in any enjoyable or interesting way.

1 star for the scenery, and 1 star for the stuffed monkey. I was going to award another star for the reference to "oceanic whitetip sharks", but when the sharks in question finally put in an appearance, they turn out to be blacktip reef sharks. Apparently even the oceanic whitetips wanted nothing to do with this mess.

There is a good film to be made about old-school East End gangsters vs. Modern street punks. This is definitely not it.

The basic trope of the film -- dumb thugs mess with the wrong person -- is nothing new, but that lack of originality isn't what dooms the film. It might be more the fact that the cast, both the old guard and the young thugs seem to mostly sleep-walk through the picture. For a film about murder, it's almost restful: everything is so predictable and so heavily signaled in advance that it's almost devoid of any tension at all. Unfortunately, the director doesn't seem in a hurry to get anywhere, so you have to sit there waiting for the next obvious plot point to slowly unfold.

The tone is similarly uneven. This is a film in which a group of old men brutally torture three young men to death, but it seems to want to be a light-hearted comedy. It's not a terribly funny one, with most of the humor consisting of rather bland jokes about old age or unfamiliarity with modern technology.

The film's two greatest weaknesses relate to the way that it handles its protagonists. The main character and his gang are cardboard cutout violent old men; nothing about them suggests recognizable East London villains of a particular era. And while Ian Ogilvy does a good job at conveying the charm of his character, he can't generate a matching sense of menace, even when he's casually blowing away teenagers with a sawn-off shotgun. The old villains of the East End might have had a code that today's punks lack, but they were also terrifying psychopaths. If we "We Still Kill" could have channeled some sense of that frightening violence, it might have redeemed itself a little, but it doesn't.

Lysette Anthony is good as an anxious, past-her-prime gangster groupie who remembers the gang boss in his prime with both fear and desire; her scenes with an affable, attentive-to-detail Ian Ogilvy are the film's strongest moments, and hint at what a more capable writer might have done with the same material and cast. And Christopher Ellison looks the part of an old-school hard man. But otherwise, there's little to recommend this plodding, by-the-numbers movie.

"Tough good guy seeks revenge after wife and child are murdered" is a stock movie plot that's probably been done way too many times, but there are ways to make it interesting. This film doesn't. It just delivers a cookie-cutter revenge plot, mixes in a few dozen more well-worn tropes, and plods its way to the end.

The big reveal and the twist ending were both predictable from early on and significant parts of the plot didn't make sense. The story itself felt disjointed, lurching from one set-piece action scene to another. It felt very much as if the writers had given up and were just phoning it in.

The target audience is clearly people who like guns and soldiers way too much, but the filmmakers then made the baffling decision to throw in a Black female Navy SEAL commander, infuriating and alienating the very demographic that the movie was made for. The character, incidentally, is perhaps the only one in the film who has any kind of screen presence. She's not believable as a military bad-ass, but she is at least interesting to watch, not something that can be said for any other character in the film.

The same apathy that infected the writers seems to have spread to most of the actors. Even the often-excellent Guy Pearce looks like a man who's mostly thinking about his paycheck. Jodie Turner-Smith does a capable job with few words and subtle gestures, but she's probably in the wrong movie. Michael B. Jordan just seems numbed, not so much by personal tragedy as by dull writing. He too deserves a better movie: here he delivers a by-the-numbers performance for a by-the-number script.

Medieval scholars will probably find substantial problems with the film's depiction of the Middle Ages, but to a non-historian it certainly feels closer than many other period movies: buildings are mostly squalid and insubstantial, the weapons and armor of the soldiers are crude and ill-assorted - Ulric (Sean Bean), the bishop's envoy, has the best of everything, while his followers are progressively less well-equipped as they descend the social scale - and it gives a good sense of the unwelcoming, sparsely-populated landscapes of medieval Britain. The casting works well too: the soldiers are, for the most part, neither Hollywood pretty-boys nor stock grotesques, but have the look of real people, 'warts and all'.

The impression of a brutal, bleak time when life was not merely cheap but nearly worthless is reinforced by the look of the film. It's coldly lit, and everything is misty and uncertain. This distinctive atmosphere creates a feeling of constantly impending disaster without the need for the cheap frights and minor chords of a horror movie.

The characterization is often surprisingly complex: Ulric may be a fanatic, but he's also a pragmatist who is no crueler than he needs to be. Even his soldiers are not one-dimensional brutes, but have their own personalities, with subtly-sketched human traits. The film encourages you to think about the motivation of even the most minor characters. Eddie Redmayne as Osmund does a good job of presenting a complex and conflicted character for much of the film.

The weak point where the characters are concerned are the women. Averill (Kimberley Nixon) and Langiva (Carice Van Houten) sometimes feel more like plot devices than people. This is not the fault of the actresses, who both deliver good performances. It's just that their characters are more constrained by the requirements of the plot.

As with any film in which religion plays a major part, there's been some debate as to whether the film is pro- or anti-Christian. To my mind, it's neither. All the characters, whichever faction they represent, are badly compromised. The only value system that it really seems to promote is that of simple humanity. It's no accident that the director gives the final voice- over to Wolfstan (John Lynch), who emerges ultimately as the film's most sympathetic character, a somewhat tarnished and world-weary ideal of what it means to be a 'good man'.

By and large, the film works well in terms of plot and pacing. It doesn't drag, and there are few obvious plot holes. Where it falls down badly, however, is with the ending segment, which feels like a hurriedly-sketched afterthought. The fact that the director felt it necessary to deliver key material in the form of a voice-over should have warned him that he needed to rethink his approach. The film would probably have been not only complete but also stronger if that whole section had simply been cut.

It isn't a standout film, but it's certainly an interesting one. It's well made and acted and it leaves you with plenty to think about. Any film-maker who wants to truly convey the feel of the Middle Ages - brutal and squalid, and at once alien and familiar - should watch "Black Death" and take notes.

The best way I can describe this movie to you is by asking you to imagine your friend's dumpy, middle-aged mom, dressed up for Halloween in a skimpy 'warrior princess' costume. That's Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris and she's every bit as embarrassing to watch as your friend's mom would be. Moreover, she doesn't seem to be enjoying the party much. She goes through the film with an ill-tempered pout welded to her face, looking as if she's perpetually on the edge of saying 'Screw this' and storming off. Unfortunately for us, she decided to stick around, growling out her lines like someone being forced to read the telephone book at gunpoint.

So much for "the most beautiful woman in two worlds". The "fighting Virginian", Captain John Carter, isn't much better. He's a sword-and-sandal beefcake who looks to be about half her age, with spiky hair and the kind of 'tramp stamp' back tattoo more commonly seen on oversexed teenage girls. He spends most of the movie smirking to himself.

Rounding out the cast are a few sinister swarthy figures, and a small - very small - army of undersized tharks (humanoid Martian monsters). The tharks also mostly sound as if they're having their lines read to them over the telephone, but their faces are mercifully hidden behind tusked plastic masks, so there's no way to tell whether they're pouting or smirking. In some scenes, the tharks appear to tower over John Carter, as if the film-makers had remembered that they're supposed to be fifteen feet tall. In the next shot they've suddenly shrunk to human size again. My guess would be that the makers originally planned to fake the size differences using clever camera angles, but found that it was too much work. For financial reasons, they were apparently unwilling to re-shoot the scenes they'd already filmed, so they just stuck them in and hoped for the best.

There are also some sinister swarthy figures, a collection of computer-animated monsters plodding morosely across a desert landscape and some giant ant/spider things, some of which fly and all of which explode in a splash of vivid green ichor when shot with the flimsy art deco rifles carried by the tharks. It looks rather as if the spiders - which do not appear in the original novel - somehow used up the limb budget for the whole film, forcing drastic cutbacks elsewhere: the tharks have only two arms, while the eight-legged thoats have become bipeds. The scenery is similarly reduced. It looks like what it is -- not the fabled deserts of Barsoom, but a few rocks in a sandy patch of waste ground somewhere outside L.A.

I couldn't bring myself to watch the movie all the way through. There didn't seem to be any point. It's fairly clear that the film-makers probably felt the same way, but they at least stuck it out and dragged it to some kind of plodding conclusion. Or so I assume.

It would be nice to imagine that the movie was intended as a kind of post-modern satire on Burroughs' overblown heroic fantasy. In this cynical vision, everything is deceptive and disappointing, a cruel metaphor for the human condition -- the deserts of Barsoom are nothing but a sandy backlot, the peerless princess is a middle-aged former porn star, the ultimate champion just an over-muscled gym rat. Scholars would applaud the daring irony, the bold inversion of the escapist epic. But I'm afraid that the cynicism was of a different kind and that the makers were simply trying to make a quick buck as cheaply and crudely as possible.

Even 'completists' who want to see everything inspired by Burroughs' work should give this one a miss. It's just depressingly bad on every level.

Movie adaptations of much-loved books can rarely satisfy the fans, but even making allowances for that, this is a deeply disappointing film. People not familiar with Susan Cooper's "Dark is Rising" cycle will find this simply another lackluster and occasionally bewildering teen fantasy film, while anyone who read and enjoyed Cooper's books would be well-advised to steer clear of the film altogether: it will simply make them angry.

The attraction of Cooper's books is that they are both mythologically and psychologically powerful. Her characters are well-drawn, complex and believable, and the story is deeply rooted in British mythology. The film has none of that: the mythological aspect has been entirely excised, and the psychology reduced to the lowest common-denominator of teen alienation. Even the quintessentially English character of the stories was apparently judged too threatening or complex for American audiences, so the protagonist has been Americanized and the setting reduced to some cutesy chocolate-box Hollywood vision of rural England.

Probably the only bright point of the movie is Alexander Ludwig, in the part of Will Stanton. He isn't Cooper's Will Stanton, but he turns in a respectable performance. In this, he's in marked contrast to the adult actors who seem mostly to have phoned in their work.

Granted, the script writer hasn't given any of them much to do. Ian McShane's Merriman, a pivotal character in the books, has been reduced to intoning portentously "... for you are the Seeker ..." at regularly-spaced intervals. Naturally, in a film that assumes that the audience must be spoon-fed, everything has to be telegraphed, repeatedly if necessary. It's not enough to have fancy visual effects and abrupt changes of season; someone has to actually announce that the characters are traveling in time. Apparently, the film-makers don't think the audience are going to be able to figure that one out for themselves. It's educational to contrast the subtlety and effectiveness with which Cooper reveals her world in the books with the kind of ham-fisted lay-it-on-with-a-trowel exposition that the makers of the film considered necessary.

The result is a rambling mess where the hero stumbles through his required tasks - all of which fall more or less into his lap without any great dramatic tension - until the predictable last-minute rout of the forces of darkness. Even someone with no prior exposure to Cooper's work is likely to find it dull. It can't be judged good or enjoyable by any standard.

Quite how the movie came to be such a travesty is difficult to say. The source material, had anyone associated with the movie bothered to read it, is compelling and well-structured, such that simply following the story faithfully (and preserving some of Cooper's dialog) would have made for a much better movie. In the hands of, for example, the BBC, it could have made an excellent mini-series. Screenwriter John Hodge must take much of the blame for his insipid and amateurish screenplay, yet his track record - including the excellently- written "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" - makes me wonder if he contrived this disaster all himself, or if he was under pressure from director Cunningham (whose own resume might have led one to predict that he would make something like this) to dumb everything down for the benefit of some imaginary audience of American teenagers with single-digit IQs.

There's no reason to waste time on this film (I saw it on an airplane). If you know how to read, you'd be vastly better off spending the time and the money on the original books.

"El dia que me quieras" looks at the iconic photograph of the executed revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, taken by Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta. The film includes interviews with Alborta, intercut with some arresting and sometimes surreal scenes from a Bolivian village festival.

"El dia" is an interesting meditation on the photograph and the circumstances under which it was taken, but the material may be too slight to justify a thirty-minute documentary. The scenes shot in the village, while undeniably beautiful, feel like padding.

The film doesn't offer any major revelations to students of either Guevara or photography, but it's an interesting and attractive piece nonetheless. It's just a pity that the director didn't have slightly more to show for his thirty minutes.

I have seen a great many bad movies in my life: if any of them were worse than this, I must have repressed the memory. If I could give this film less than a 1, I would.

No one seeing a title like "Shaolin Dolemite" would expect Tarkovsky. However, you might expect something humorously awful that would be good to watch for laughs over a few beers. Unfortunately, this one passes through the "So bad it's good" zone without even slowing down, and ends up firmly in the realm of "So bad it's depressing".

As far as I can tell, someone basically took a ninth-rate kungfu movie (probably "Ninja: The Final Duel") and welded on a few scenes - perhaps ten minutes in total - featuring Rudy-Ray Moore. Mr Moore does not actually do any kungfu. He simply ambles on in a dashiki and shades from time to time, cocks his head quizzically and says "Motherfucker" and "Shee-it" a few times. He looks gray (literally; the color is bad throughout, but appears to be particularly 'off' during his scenes) and depressed. As well he might be.

The 'plot' is the usual kungfu mishmash of evil ninjas, virtuous monks, and random ass- kickers who periodically meet up and pound on each other until someone spits blood and collapses. Among the large cast of people who you won't care about there is a warrior prince, several monks with runaway eyebrows, a cackling arch-villain in what looks like a clean- room 'bunny suit', a Davey Crockett character in a coonskin cap and a topless female ninja.

The original Chinese dialog has been - poorly - dubbed over with English. Something might have been salvaged from the whole train-wreck if the new dialog were actually amusing, but it isn't. The contribution of the writers seems to have been to throw in a few obscenities and some lame 'jokes' about African-American culture, none of which are even slightly funny. The most disturbing thing about the film might actually be that someone - possibly more than one person - actually believed that this drivel was witty.

There's no reason for this film to exist, except as an awful warning. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to watch it, ever. It's not cheesy or 'so bad it's good'. It's just boring and painful. Avoid.

To go to a martial arts movie expecting intelligence, good acting

and a strong plot is something like expecting the same things

from a sports video. Perhaps we've been spoiled by the rare

exceptions, which have led us wrongly to believe that a martial arts

movie should consist of more than a bunch of extremely fit people

energetically kicking the snot out of each other.

"China Strike Force" is well down there with the bulk of the "Never

mind the plot, let's brawl" productions. There is a token plot -

young cops up against bad guys trying to smuggle drugs into

China - and some token characters - two "best buddy" impetuous

young cops, hot ass-kicking chick, powerful but principled

'godfather', and various villains to kick and be kicked. Nothing we

haven't seen before, and the film doesn't exactly break a sweat

making sure we understand all the ramifications of the intricate

plot.

The best performance is probably that of Siu-Ming Lau, whose role

as the 'godfather' figure is undemanding but which he carries off

capably enough. The worst performance is unquestionably that of

Coolio, as a badass black gangster from South Central. Granted,

Coolio probably doesn't aspire to play Shakespeare (although I'd

be quite interested to see him try, because he _can_ act and has a

certain presence), but as he hams his way through this crude

racial caricature, it's impossible not to imagine that he had his

eyes firmly fixed on his paycheck throughout and that it was

apparently large enough to overcome any scruples he might have

had about the role. It would be nice to think that one day the "black

man as swaggering pimp" archetype will follow Uncle Tom onto

history's cutting room floor, but "China Strike Force" unfortunately

confirms that that day isn't here yet.

Marc Dacascos radiates his usual gravitas, but after a while of this

you start asking yourself _why_ he is lending his air of dignity to

such a shallow and uninteresting film. Presumably another large

paycheck was involved. Dacascos is another actor who deserves

better. Some day someone will cast him in a role that makes

better use of his undeniable charisma and his understated style of

acting - the sometimes weak but still enjoyable "Brotherhood of

the Wolf" came close - but in the meantime he's apparently

reduced to slumming in productions of this kind.

The screenplay is largely by the numbers. There are occasional

attempts at humor, but no one seems to care whether the gags

come off of not so they mostly languish and die. The funniest part

of the movie is probably an outtake involving some fizzy Vitamin C

tablets, which suggests that the budget could have been reduced

and the movie improved by firing Coolio and replacing him with a

few bottles of soluble aspirin.

Martial arts fans may enjoy the fight sequences, for their settings if

not for their virtuosity, but there's a definite sense that everything's

been done before and better elsewhere. Overall, the lasting

impression is of a lazily put-together film with nothing particular to

offer and nowhere much to go except to video.

"Riders" is that rare thing - a bad movie that has nothing at all to recommend it. Oh sure, there are some neat (but unoriginal) stunts, and the people are cute to look at. But that's all. Really.

The film's French tagline - "Bank robbery is an extreme sport" - says where the film is coming from: it's the equivalent of that endless sports channel footage of skaters and snowboarders, but done as a heist movie. Unfortunately, it has about the same attention to character and scenario development as the sports channel footage.

The attraction of heist movies is watching the clever plot unfold, unravel, and then either work or fall apart. "Riders" doesn't offer any of that. No tension, no development, nada. Just another implausible heist, another burst of extreme sports footage, then back to the clubhouse for the cool young dudes to plan their next coup.

Except that they don't plan. Or rehearse much. Everything seems to 'just happen'. "Oh look, we just pulled off another perfectly- executed heist. How about that?"

This goes for the inevitable entanglements as well - the bad guys who want their share of the loot just seem to surge out of the woodwork on cue. Despite all the masks and disguises and extreme sports getaways, no one - police or thieves - actually seems to have any difficulty working out who these people are and where to find them. Did they leave flyers at the scene of the crime? Put up a website or something? The director doesn't tell, but telling a coherent story is apparently not one of his priorities.

There's lots more not to like. The dialogue is clunky, the performances are mediocre at best. The four hip young things and Natasha Henstridge are merely lacklustre; it's left to the veteran actors to really drag the movie down to the depths where it belongs. Bruce Payne is bad by any standard, but the prize has to go to Steven Berkoff, whose unwatchable scenery-chewing (complete with gratingly-false Southern accent) breaks new ground in the history of bad acting. If they'd digitally replaced him with Jar-Jar Binks it would have been more convincing and less painful to watch.

To describe this as "Straight to video" material would be too kind. It's not even that good.

A common criticism of American films is that they focus on special effects and big-ticket stars at the expense of anything resembling a credible storyline. The same could be said of "Wasabi", where the plot is so thin as to be practically skeletal. To its credit, at least the weakness of the story is offset by some capable performances and a good comic dynamic.

Jean Reno, as a heavy-handed police inspector, plays his part well, but he's capable of far better. He's too professional to actually sleepwalk through the part, but he's not far off it and it's probably the fault of the script for not putting him to better use.

The star turn comes from Ryoko Hirosue, in a fizzball performance that's the perfect foil to the sombre gravitas of Reno's character. As a caricature of a Tokyo teenager, she's an explosion of bright colors and effervescent emotions. Yumi's moods change too fast to be entirely believable, but it's a tribute to the skill of the actress that she is able not only to handle the range of emotions required, but also to fuse them into a likeable whole.

The movie is essentially set up as a series of comic setpieces (and periodic outbursts of cartoonish but often bloody violence) featuring Reno and Hirosue (or between Reno and sidekick Michel Muller, all bulging eyes and protruding ears). The combinations work well, and there are some genuinely funny moments, helped by some witty editing. But ultimately, many of the scenes feel like token nods to the need to move the weak story along to the next comic interlude.

The basic 'odd couple' premise is a well-tested device, and the two lead actors are more than gifted enough to make it work, but they're sold short by a story that feels like it was scribbled on a napkin over lunch and then given to a secretary to flesh out.

Likeable low-key comedy, with a nice line in understated dry humor. The film is composed of seven short stories each illustrating one of the 'sins' of the title, the sins in this case being such things as 'tenderness'. Robert Mitchum is excellent in a relatively small part as a very American God (God smokes big cigars and speaks English; the rest of the dialogue is in French).

Quirky and enjoyable in an understated way.

A handsome secret agent, beautiful women, fast cars and fight sequences, plus a megalomaniac with a fiendish plot to hold the world to ransom: sound familiar? Yes, MI:2 is squarely in James Bond territory. In fact, I couldn't help wondering if MI:2 doesn't amount to a conscious attempt to take over the Bond market niche now that the Bond theme - despite the reinjection of Pierce Brosnan to try to kick some life into the series - is so clearly played-out.

In fairness, this is a shrewder idea than having MI:2 follow in the steps of the first "Mission Impossible", a movie that tried to be dark and brooding and merely ended up tedious and occasionally baffling. MI:2 is popcorn, but at least it seems to want to be enjoyable popcorn. Unfortunately, the director doesn't appear to have any idea of how to achieve this: as a result, the film simply goes through the motions for a couple of hours, and then gives up.

Centre-stage, as ever, is Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Or is that Ethan Hunt as Tom Cruise? The distinction between star and character can seldom have been more blurred, especially since Hunt doesn't appear to have any kind of personality to call his own. When Tom Cruise performs the free-climbing sequences - Hunt's idea of a holiday - are we watching Ethan Hunt's idea of a holiday, or Tom Cruise's? Of course Tom Cruise is an actor, not a secret agent. But Hunt seems to have so little character, and so few defining characteristics beyond Cruise's boyish good looks, that to all intents and purposes they might as well be one and the same.

Cruise, to give him credit, does his best. He smiles and leaps and kicks people and runs and looks nice. Alas, the same cannot be said of Anthony Hopkins, who appears to be acting in his sleep. (He was very nearly acting in my sleep too, but I kept my eyes open somehow). The spectacularly bad lipsync that plagued much of the movie is also at its worst in Hopkins' scenes: I felt as if I were watching something that had been dubbed from German.

Thandie Newton is another disappointment. The casting agency were apparently given the difficult brief of finding someone prettier than Tom Cruise for him to act with. With the heart-breakingly gorgeous Newton, they clearly succeeded. Her early scenes also suggest that she can act as well. She has the makings of an extraordinary, memorable Bond, er, Hunt Girl. Given free rein, she could probably have transformed the movie. But her role simply dries up partway-through, leaving her little more to do than look hurt and vulnerable for the rest of the film. It's a terrible waste.

'Wasteful' would be a good description of the film as a whole. It's as if the director knows that he won't be asked to direct MI:3, so he's using up all the cliches in the genre while he has his hand on the clapperboard. If the MI series is the new Bond, it's peaking early: two films into the series, it's already fallen into the formula rut. It's also sloppily done: the 'need-to-know' information about the virus is repeated over and over to make sure we've got it (clue for Hollywood: audiences aren't as stupid as you think they are). The trademarks - Hunt dangling from a rope as in the first movie, and John Woo's pigeons - are fairly trowelled on, and the plot-holes come thick and fast. Most irritating of all, the 'face-mask' gimmick, where characters pull off a latex mask to reveal that they are actually someone else, is repeated over and over, without rhyme or reason. To use this trick once tests the audience's ability to suspend disbelief already: to use it as often as MI:2 does, in such implausible circumstances, is sheer laziness. After a while, you're all but expecting Thandie Newton to rip off her face-mask and reveal that she's actually Anthony Hopkins.

Unfortunately, MI:2 takes itself too seriously for that: the only moment when it comes close to self-parody is when villain Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) gives a sardonic commentary on Hunt's plans to infiltrate a building. For the rest, there's little humor in the film (and several of the scarce jokes come across as oddly misogynistic). Tom Cruise's po-faced Hunt can never deadpan the way Bond would, which is bad news for the series: now that Bond movies have become thoroughly formulaic, the occasional dry wit is one of the few redeeming devices they have left. If MI:2 can't even manage that, future sequels will have little to recommend them.

Unfortunately, car chases and explosions are no longer enough. Despite all the pyrotechnics and the slow-motion aerial kung-fu, the one truly vivid scene in the film remains the rock-climbing sequence at the start. Without any need for quick-fire action, with no enemies except gravity to fight, it's nonetheless genuinely tense and gripping. If Woo could have offered more scenes like that, MI:2 might have been superb. Alas, it's a solitary high-point: nothing else in the film ever attains that level again.

If Mission Impossible wants Bond's crown, tarnished and tired as it is, the makers will need to do better than this. Simply repeating the usual cliches with nicer photography and a bigger special effects budget won't cut it, no matter how cute Tom Cruise may be. If ever there was a series in need of a new direction and some original ideas, this is it.

A curious little movie, this one. It seems to hover between the world of 'straight to video' derivatives and something rather better. Perhaps it deserves to be classed with "Slipstream" - a low-budget SF film with plenty of failings but enough interesting features to make it worth a look.

On the face of it, the main theme of the film - stranded space travellers on an alien planet must struggle for survival against nasty local creatures that eat them one by one - has been done to death. The "Alien" series pretty much wrote the book on this one, and by reinventing the theme slightly with each iteration, more or less exhausted the possibilities of the idea. The makers of "Pitch Black" also deserve a hefty virtual slap for using another of science-fiction's tired cliches, the dreaded meteor storm.

One thing that redeems "Pitch Black" is the focus on characters. While the characters are cliched - plucky but vulnerable pilot, superhuman serial killer, tough-guy bounty hunter, serene holy man, and a handful of the usual monster fodder - the director allows each of the actors room to work with the material that they've been given and the results are surprisingly good. Vin Diesel's sardonic Riddick is "Hannibal Lecter" Lite, but with greater room for depth and development, while Radha Mitchell turns in an impressive performance as the young pilot pushed into taking command in an impossible situation. Between them, they establish an intriguing and often plausible human dynamic that is rarely seen in similar films. That "Pitch Black" is able to rise above the level of the usual "eat-'em-one-by-one" picture (something that, for example, "Event Horizon", with its much larger budget and celebrity cast, was not) is because it becomes a film not about monsters but about flawed humanity, and the largely unknown cast are good enough to make their characters - even the most minor - believable and often likeable.

The picture also looks better than you would expect. The cast wear their clothes and equipment as if they lived in them, and the back story hints at a complex, multi-faceted civilisation (albeit one without any wild leaps of creative imagination: the technology and concepts are all fairly twentieth-century). The spaceship sets have a gritty, workaday feel, while the bleached, washed-out tones of the daylight exterior scenes actually make the alien setting seem real. When the characters emerge from the dark confines of the hull into the glare of day, your eyes narrow in sympathy. This is a Star Trek universe, where crash-landings are always made on planets that have breathable air, water and (usually hostile) life, but for all that, the nameless planet of "Pitch Black" is as barren and brutal as the plot will allow.

"Pitch Black" is not without serious flaws: there's much, beginning with the main plot premise, that's hackneyed or unconvincing. But at the same time there are definitely things to like about it and food for thought. The fact that it is ultimately a film about the best and worst in human nature makes it deeper and more gripping than the broad outlines of the story might suggest.

It's tempting to view this film as a daring avant-garde experiment. I like to think that the director was trying to see if it was possible to take all the conventions of comedy film and produce something that was completely, utterly, entirely unfunny.

The answer, to judge by "A Weekend at Bernie's II", is a resounding 'Yes'. This may not be the worst film I've ever seen, but my brain seems to have repressed all memory of the others. "Weekend" hovers just on the borderline; bad enough that the thought still causes pain, but not quite so bad that my internal censors have obliterated it from my consciousness.

The plot involves a walking corpse, two protagonists who might just as well be walking corpses, a collection of villains who suffer a succession of 'comic' mishaps, and a pretty girl with nice breasts. There's some voodoo involved, a tropical location, and some money which all the characters (including the dead one) want to get their hands on. It's basically just a weak rehash of the standard hidden money and awkward unwanted object plots (in this case the awkward unwanted object is a dead body that exhibits rather more life than anyone else on the set), and primarily serves as a means to string together a series of slapstick set pieces. The slapstick is both entirely predictable and unfunny, and the humor as a whole seems to be pitched at the low end of the fourteen-year old level (i.e. 'smut lite' and people getting hit in the balls).

It's difficult for me to imagine what the director and the cast thought they were doing when they made this, or why they went ahead and released it once they'd made it. I doubt anyone involved with it earned very much, but surely between them they could have got together enough money to buy up all the prints and have them burned.

This is a movie that has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. It's not even enjoyably bad. It's just a non-movie in which nothing interesting or funny happens. I gave serious thought to walking out, which is not something I often do. If I'd seen it in a cinema, rather than on a long-distance bus doing a steady 60mph through the Mexican desert, I might even have done so...