Reviews

While it is hardly high art, Knight & Day is a moderately entertaining bit of fluff. It's clearly been cynically designed to be film that men and women can both enjoy. The problem is that while you can make a good romantic comedy (there must be at least one, I suppose) and you can make a good comic thriller I think that a good romantic comedy thriller may be impossible. The elements are too disparate.

Tom "Bonzo Loony McInsaneypants" Cruise is his usual charming self and runs a good level of manic energy. I'd seen the trailer a few times and in typical Hollywood fashion it ruined just about all the best lines of the film. The moment where Cruise says "If anyone tries to stop me I'll kill myself and then her" should have been hilarious but having seen it in so many trailers it just seemed tired.

The word "kooky" could have been invented for Cameron Diaz and she is very charming in the film. Her transition from humble classic car restorer to international secret agent seems a bit unlikely but then so is this film so why not.

Spoiler

June (Diaz) gets onto a plane with Roy Miller (Cruise) and "wacky" violence ensues. Whilst June's in the kharzi Miller kills everyone on the plane and crashes it in a field.

Miller, you see, has absconded with a super-top-secret AA battery which can power a city. The US government want it back and think that Miller may have handed it off to June which puts her in the frame as well.

This kicks off a global chase much of which occurs offscreen whilst June, drugged by Miller, is unconscious.

End Spoiler

In the end Knight & Day is a compromise film. It's designed to be a good date movie. It has some crash-bang-wallop for the guys, some swoony-smoochy to keep the ladies interested and a bit of comedy to round it all off. All told it was moderately entertaining and for what it is designed to do it does fine. If you want to see a good film starring either Cameron Diaz or Tom Cruise there are better alternatives.

Centurion is about the Ninth Legion which may or may not have disappeared during the Roman occupation of Brittania. There has been some interest in the Ninth recently with the Arthurian kids film The Last Legion and the forthcoming Eagle of the Ninth project.

The film is vintage Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday etc.) in that it combines extreme gore with good dialogue and a high body count. The acting is universally excellent the special effects are good and the story exciting (if not at all complex).

Spoiler

It's 117 AD, and bang on time. Naughty Picts, lead by their king Gorlacon, are waging an effective guerrilla war against the occupying Roman forces. Michael Fassbender (or, as I shall hereforth call him, "The Fass") stars as Roman centurion, Quintus Dias who is captured by Gorlacon's forces when his outpost is overrun and his comrades slaughtered.

Meanwhile, Arigcola, governor of Brittania, dispatches the Ninth Legion under their General (Dominic West) on a mission to track down Gorlacon and destroy him. To assist he lends them his best underwear model... sorry, I mean his best tracker, a mute Pict called Etain (Olga Kurilenko). Along the way they happen across Quintus, who has escaped his pursuers and co-opt him into guiding them to the Pictish stronghold.

Soon after the Legion is ambushed and destroyed by Gorlacon's troops. Quintus and a small band of Romans survive and set off to save the captured general.

The rest of the film involves Quintus' small band of soldiers attempt to make it back to friendly territory whilst being relentlessly pursued by an angry Russian underwear model with a fur fetish.

End Spoiler

Neil Marshall is at his very best in stories about soldiers and in Centurion he is back on territory familiar from Dog Soldiers (2002). Barring the supernatural element there is some similarity in the tone of both films and I feel certain that if you enjoyed one you will enjoy the other. Both films involve a small unit of professional soldiers in a situation that they cannot control and seem unlikely to survive.

I can offer Centurion no greater praise than to say that it is almost as good as Dog Soldiers.

As in the case of all immediate and great artistic successes, Nimród Antal's film speaks directly to the contemporary ear. When Predators was released, its director had been living for many years in France, and the film evinces more the influence of Rousseau and Stendhal than of Kafka or the Capeks. Antal is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his other works, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart.

Antal is the most unjudgmental of moralists. When Walton Goggins' character Stans says "I'm gonna rape me some fine b*tches" one immediately sees the deconstruction of our petty conventional mores about the nature of good and evil.

A film, even a film by so engagé a director as Antal, must be judged in terms of art, and not of its moral, social or political weight. There may be too much spilt politics in Predators for its own good. What is remarkable, however, is that a work so firmly rooted in its time seems so unlikely to become dated. The world has changed profoundly since 1987's Predator, but Antal's film seems as relevant now as the original did.

Only joking...

Predators is a worthy successor to Predator (1987). Predator films (and to a certain extend AvP movies as well) exist to try to keep us entertained for a little over an hour and a half with a good dose of mindless violence and enjoyable characters. To that end this film delivers admirably. The characters are hardly deeply drawn but are memorable and distinctive and, in a few cases, even hint at hidden depths.

All in all Predators is a cracking hour and three quarters of entertainment. It isn't great art but I was hardly expecting it to be.

I notice that there are now at least two types of Predator. New Predator (bigger jaws and different eyes) and Predator Classic. I think I prefer Predator Classic. I am also pleased to see that they've upgraded their gear from Hunter 3.0 to the more advanced Hunter 7 operating system.

Inception is a relatively simple story made complex by the way that it is told. In that respect it is unsurprising that it was conceived at the same time that Christopher Nolan was making his breakthrough project Memento, again a simple story rendered complex by its presentation

SPOILER

Inception is about an attempt to insert an idea into the conscious mind of a dreaming subject in such a way as to make him believe that the idea is his own or originated from his own subconscious. This is the titular "inception". The subject is Cillian Murphy, heir to a vast corporate empire which is close to achieving a monopoly of power generation. The idea to be implanted is that he should break up his father's corporate empire. The prime motivator is businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) who hires ideas thief Dom (Leonardo diCaprio) after the latter botches an attempt at extracting information from Saito's own dreams.

Dom assembles a team comprising an architect who will design the dream spaces (Ellen Page), someone who can impersonate others in dreams (Tom Hardy) and a drug specialist who can keep them under long enough to achieve their goal. Along for the ride is Dom's long suffering partner in crime Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Saito himself. Whether the scheme succeeds and how the story plays out I will leave to the viewer to discover.

END SPOILER

Much of the film revolves around explaining the process of entering and monkeying with people's dreams. In this Nolan is clever as dreams are a universal shared human experience. Thus the sensation of falling which often wakes people becomes a core element of the process of stepping up out of dreams and seems entirely convincing. Whilst we know that this is fantasy it has that crucial ring of believability to it and obeys its own laws so far as the requirements of narrative and suspense allow.

I suspect that people who have seen this film will fall into three categories. Males aged 14 - 21 will probably treat this film as a religious experience, ascribing it with all manner of "important" philosophical "truths". Males who were 14 - 21 in 1999 will, I suspect, hate it - accusing it of being a rip off of the "masterpiece" of their generation, The Matrix. Anyone else will probably see it, enjoy it and then forget it. I suspect that there is a pseudo- philosophical action film for every generation and this is simply the latest.

For all that, Inception is an enjoyable film. It is roughly 43% as intelligent as it thinks it is but it is well crafted, nicely filmed and excellently acted.

Leonardo diCaprio seems to have built a career out of playing damaged people with dark secrets in their past (his characters in Shutter Island, Blood Diamond, The Departed and, in fact, just about everything he has done in the last decade or so) but he is reliably good at it and is so here. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is brilliant as always, although sadly relegated to a side role. Ellen Page is good but her character simply exists to have the mechanics of the world explained to her and the audience, thus she has little chance to shine. The show-stealer is Tom Hardy who has almost all of the film's funny lines and all but one of the funny moments.

The special effects are impressive but restrained, as with the best films they support the story rather than become the point of it.

The weakest element is the plot which is very simple but then maybe it needs to be. With the added confusion of different layers of reality intermingling anything more complex would have required that moviegoers be handed a flowchart on leaving the cinema (which would have been very welcome in the case of 2004's Primer http://xkcd.com/657/large/).

In closing I'd like to add my own slant to the debate as to the closing scene. It strikes me that what is important is not whether it falls but the fact that Dom doesn't care if it does or doesn't. Perhaps the message is that reality is what we decide it is.

On a colleague's recommendation I bought the first series on DVD. Fortunately my new set of three 30 Rock novelty coasters didn't cost too much otherwise I might be a little annoyed.

30 Rock is supposed to be based around the running of a hit late night comedy TV show. The problem is that it isn't, it's a rather lazy, relationship based comic soap opera which just happens to involve the employees of a TV station. The show-within-a-show is apparently effortless to make leaving plenty of time for the characters to get involved in "wacky" situations with "hilarious consequences". I quote the "hilarious consequences" because they mostly aren't. I offer into evidence the episode in which the main character is mistakenly set up on a lesbian date. Regardless of the fact that this is a joke that was out of date in 1985 it is handled without a jot of wit or humour. Another example is the pretty young girl in the office who wears increasingly skimpy outfits as we are invited to rock with laughter at the way the men leer at her. The gentle hum your can hear in the background is Benny Hill revolving in his grave.

A big part of the problem is that almost all the characters fall into one of two categories; embarrassingly stereotypical or Tina Fey. Starting with the stereotypes - the most obvious, though by no means the only, example is "Twofer" - so named because he is black and went to Harvard. This is a joke so bad that it just about qualifies as a monstrous insult. Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, head writer of TGS takes up most of the screen time. Sadly she manages to effortlessly combine being charmless, unfunny and annoying. The only exception, and possible saving grace, is Alec Baldwin's Jack, the Machiavellian GE studio executive in charge of the show-within-a-show. He is genuinely good. In all likelihood this is down to the simple fact that Baldwin has enough muscle to push his character a bit further and have some fun with it.

I suppose that I would have to admit that 30 Rock suffered massively in my estimation by comparison with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. On it's worst day Studio 60 was funnier, cleverer and more engaging than 30 Rock has so far managed. The irony of it all is that Studio 60 was a "serious" drama. In television, it seems, dumb beats smart every time. Witness the proliferation of reality television - America's Favorite Celebrity Big Brother's Survivor Dancing on Ice or whatever. The internet tells me both shows premiered within weeks of each other and from the word "go" it must have been depressingly obvious which one was going to survive.

Basically this show is comedy for thicko's - masquerading as something intelligent. I suspect that 30 Rock will run for 700 seasons and make bazillions for Fey but I cannot help weeping for all the Studio 60 we'll never see.

I come from Wiltshire and we all know that Somerset is still beset by feudalism, the black death, witchcraft, blood sacrifice and random zombification.

Solomon Kane is a cracking little film with no pretensions beyond being jolly good swash-buckling fun. An excellent cast, an above average script and some fine special effects raise it far beyond its avowedly pulp source material (penned by Robert E. Howard of Conan fame).

Spoiler

We are introduced to 17th century sea reaver (pirate/privateer) Solomon Kane during the sack of a North African city. Unfortunately for him, Kane comes face to face with with one of Satan's minions who promises that, for all his black deeds, the devil plans to claim his soul for an eternity in hell.

As a result Kane renounces his wicked ways and enters an abbey; but the film really starts when his told by the abbot to head home to claim his inheritance in the West country. The Somerset-Devon border isn't a happy place and our hero is soon set about by bandits who rob him and leave him for dead.

Kane is rescued and befriended by a family of Puritans on their way to the new world. However they soon run into an army of zombieish soldiers, lead by a sinister figure in a gimp mask. Most of the family is murdered and the baddies abscond with the daughter. Her dying father charges Solomon with recovering said waif and promises that if he does so he will regain his soul.

Solomon charges off in pursuit and if the identity of the villain and the location of his headquarters comes as very little surprise to anyone who's been paying attention, it hardly matters.

End Spoiler

Solomon Kane is a superb bit of hokum which remains entirely true to the spirit of Howard's original works without, as far as I know, being an adaptation of an extant story. Purefoy is excellent, Pete Postlethwaite and Alice Krige add some gravitas and the moppet-in-peril succeeds in being likable and endearing where she could easily have been shrill and annoying. Jason Flemyn gets to go all Alan Rickman and ham up near the end but sadly only really has a cameo appearance. Perhaps most refreshingly there is a seriousness of tone which works well with the mud and rain and general bleakness of the film. Unlike much of the sword and sorcery genre this is likely to still look good twenty years from now - a test which it hard to claim is passed by Conan, Hawk or any other 1980's fantasy film.

In conclusion, then, I count this as excellent. Violent where it should be and engaging where it needs to be. When it comes out on DVD I will be happy to add it to my collection and will enjoy watching it again.

I can say nothing worse about Daybreakers than that I'd rather have been watching Blade 4 (presumably "Blade 4.0" or possibly "BL4DE").

Most recent vampire movies are utter balls. On the one hand it's all techno music, impractical clothing and farcical weaponry ("we've got glass bullets full of liquid sunlight", yeah... right, mate, whatever you say). On the other hand it's god-awful self absorbed teenagers blathering on about love and immortality and so on. Amazingly, Daybreakers manages to combine the worst of both worlds.

What we have here is a slow boring film with little action and a script so tired that it's difficult to listen to. There are whole sections of dialogue which sound like:

Character 1: Exposition, exposition, exposition.

Character 2: Really? What about exposition, exposition?

Character 1: Oh, that's exposition, exposition, exposition, exposition.

The cinematography is washed out near-black&white and the vampire characters all wander around in slow motion a lot. Most of the time it feels like you're watching an over-long Armarni perfume ad.

SPOILER

It's twenty-past the future and vampires rule the earth. The rapidly dwindling supply of uninfected humans are captured and farmed for blood resources. So far, so Matrix. The problem is that the blood supply is running out and as the vampires starve they start to mutate into violent, brainless nosferatu style monsters.

Ethan Hawke plays Edward, a haematologist who is frantically searching for a blood substitute to save the vampire race from total annihilation. Sam Neill's evil corporate vampire wants the substitute to ensure that his company makes even more money.

Edward runs into (quite literally) the human resistance and, because he's a caring vampire is brought in to help them. He's introduced to Willem Dafoe who explains how his vampirism was cured and before you can say "wow, that's an unlikely cure" Ethan's been whacked back to mortality and has a plan to stop the evil corporate blood farmers.

END SPOILER

A few people have likened this to Gattica and yes, it'd be very like Gattica if you took away everything which made Gattica a good film and added vampires.

I haven't seen any of the Twishite films but, dear God, I have to assume that the're better than this.

Avatar reportedly cost a staggering 230 to 310 million dollars if you are prepared to believe what Wikipedia claims. Me, I can't help thinking I'd rather have had either Terminator 5 or Aliens 7 or, given the budget, both.

Go and see Avatar for the visual spectacle – and believe me when I say that describing the visuals as spectacular is an understatement. Pandora is beautifully conceived and rendered, though obviously by people who have never been in a forest in their lives given the lack of dead trees, dead leaves, mud and general detritus. The plants, animals and people are convincing and beautiful.

The critics have been going on about this being a breakthrough in film-making technology but I can't see it. It looks good but doesn't look better than, say, Lord of the Rings. The wholly animated alien people, plants and animals are no more impressive than the CGI Gollum was a few years ago. I actually felt rather disappointed, I was expecting something new but this is more of the same computer jiggery-pokery.

Do not go and see it for the plot and writing. The plot is a monumentally formulaic "don't hurt the environment, man" riff. We have seen all the characters before in a hundred other films: the driven research scientist who's brilliance allows her to be rude to everyone; the greedy corporate schill prepared to do anything to ensure a profit; the battle hardened colonel with an itchy trigger finger; etcetera ad infinitum. The dialogue, while not awful, is dull and unmemorable, lacking any humour or wit.

Go and see it, the critics like it, most people like it, you'll probably like it. I thought it was okay with a side order of gigantically missed opportunity.

Spoiler

Giant corporation, "The Company" (Weyland-Yutani perhaps), plans to strip-mine the Eden-like planet/moon Pandora*. All that stands in their way are a race of technologically primitive aboriginals, the Na'vi (who suffer from what literary grammatologists call the "Fantasy apostrophe").

Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, is recruited by The Company to operate the titular alien clone "avatar" originally made for his deceased twin brother. Sigourney Weaver's driven botanist/anthropologist wants him to help her study the aliens and their environment. Colonel Doombringer wants him to deliver intelligence on the aliens so that he can destroy them and Mr Corporate McEvil (Giovani Ribisi) wants him to persuade the Na'vi to leave their giant tree house so that he can drill for the precious unobtainum beneath it**.

Jake, however, quickly becomes enamoured by the culture and ways of the Na'vi and his teacher, a stunningly gorgeous Na'vi called Neytiri (voice and, I assume, movements of Zoe Saldana). Coming to value the environmental harmony in which the Na'vi live, Jake leads them in a final battle to try to reclaim their world from the humans***.

End Spoiler

Expect a director's cut a few years after the DVD comes out where the voice-over has been removed and a bunch of unnecessary scenes added back in.

* Who names a planet Pandora, for God's sake? Seriously? Anyone who knows their mythology knows that Pandora's Box contained all the world's evil. It's like saying "I know, we'll call it Deathworld, that sounds nice right?".

** A quick google search indicates that "Unobtainium" is the material that Oakley use to make the frames for their shades (check it out if you don't believe me). This suggest the fascinating concept that, in the future, Oakley sunglasses have become humanity's primary means of exchange.

*** !BIG SPOILER! Which they unsurprisingly win – I couldn't help thinking that before the credits there would be a screen of text saying "Three years after these events, humans returned to Pandora, cleansing its surface with nuclear fire".

AvP2: Requiem with a Vengeance is probably the best all-round family film of the decade, children will be entranced by the sickening violence and relentless gore, adults will enjoy the more philosophical questions surrounding how many aliens can burst from the belly of a pregnant woman.

This a film made by people who had a theoretical understanding of what constitutes a horror film and wanted absolutely no part of it. AvP2: The Phantom Requiem is, I think, the most calculatingly gratuitous film I have ever seen. There is an unwritten code in American film making that you don't off kiddies unless it is an essential part of the story. AvP2: The Requiem of the King kills its first child 5 minutes 11 seconds in, letting you know that no prisoners are going to be taken.

Spoiler

You could almost forget the spoiler. "It does what it says on the tin" would be an adequate description of the film. Nonetheless...

The pred-alien last seen bursting from the chest of our erstwhile (which means former) protagonist (which means hero) at the end of AvP goes wild on the predator mothership and causes it to crash in a small mountain town in one of the more foresty American states. Oregon or something like that I would imagine. Face-huggers are all over the shop and before you can say "generic plot" the place is crawling with the tooth-tounged drooling ones.

On (what I assume is the) Predator homeworld a predator gets a text message saying that he should head off to Earth for some merry alien hunting. Or maybe he's a pest control expert. Possibly he works for Rent-o-kill IN SPACE. Or something.

I cannot help wondering about the Predators. They've built a machine age civilization far in advance of our own. What's the hunting about? Are the predators we see in the various films sort of hyper-tech rednecks metaphorically off in their pick up truck for a bit of beer and deer? Or is it some sort of holiday? Are they all bored star-accountants and future-lawyers off on the space equivalent of a safari? Who knows or, quite probably, cares? Back in Onanism, Montana (or something) the story unfolds as a young man with an improbably hot girlfriend starts noticing that strange things are happening. Pred-o-kill arrives and soon enough there's a river of acid blood running everywhere.

Michelle Dessler (who obviously joined the army after faking her death in 24) comes home to see her husband and annoying child. She gives her daughter a night vision scope to play with and soon enough the kid spots an alien in the garden. This leads to one of the most epic moments in film history. Mummy and daddy run into the room. Child says "there's a monster in the garden" (they mostly come at night, mostly... apparently). Daddy walks over to the window says "honey there are no monsters" and gets eaten. It's brilliant. It's as if director had heard of A SUSPENSE but had never actually seen one in the wild.

The national guard is called in and gets comprehensively mupped. The townsfolk gather in the centre of town for a famous last stand and wait for the cavalry – unaware that the government plan to assist them WITH A NUKE! Michelle and co head for the hospital and its chopper where they discover that the pred-alien's been breeding by vomiting alien embryos down the throats of women in the maternity ward. The phrase "beyond sickening" doesn't begin cover it. I've seen some unpleasantness in my time but this rates an 11 on the Nasty-scale. Inevitably the pred-alien and the predator have it out in a big throwing-each-other-through-stuff fight before our heroes escape.

End Spoiler

This is a film to be avoided. Seriously, it'll warp you, I guarantee it. Be wary of anyone who says that they enjoyed it, they've gone wrong.

Having said that, I rather enjoyed this film. Granted the gore made Bad Taste look like a rather tame episode of The Antiques Roadshow but you've got to give the film makers credit for only missing the point by a couple of galaxies. The strange thing is that AvP2: Requiems of the Lost Ark is that it has good special effects and some competent acting on the part of the main leads.

WATCH AT YOUR PERIL

There is a depressingly regular cycle that the American film industry goes through which every now and then throws up a bunch of movies about how the world is going to be destroyed.

What promises to be an initially interesting premise turns stupid towards the end, ruining what might have been rather a good film.

Nicholas Cage is a university astrophysics lecturer who's wife was killed in a hotel fire a year previously leaving him with a semi-deaf son and a fairly severe drinking problem. The opening of a time capsule at his son's school unearths a sheet of paper filled with apparently random numbers. It quickly becomes apparent that the numbers reveal the dates and numbers of dead in every major disaster since the paper was put in the time capsule in 1959. There are only three sets of numbers left unaccounted for and these appear to predict disasters on the next three following days.

It is in the nature of the film that it is almost impossible to discuss it without writing a spoiler. For those not interested in reading a spoiler I would say this film is average. It has some decent acting and a couple of fantastic set pieces but is let down by a weak ending. It is moderately enjoyable but I probably wouldn't bother unless you are a big Nic Cage fan.

Spoiltastic

Things I liked about this movie:

1. When Nic Cage takes the numbers round to his mate and says "look, all these numbers sequentially refer to the date and number of deaths in every major international disaster for the last 50 years" his friend says "Nah, this is just a coincidence".

2. The mysterious people chasing Nic and his son around all look like cut-rate Billy Idol impersonators (or Spike from Buffy impersonators if you are from the younger generation).

3. Apparently the Billy Idol impersonators meant the page of numbers to be a warning – which were immediately sealed for 50 years in a time capsule which gets opened about three days before the predictions run out. So not that useful a warning, really.

4. The earth gets destroyed by a solar flare so massive that it ignites the atmosphere and cooks everything. Even a 10 mile high placard saying "You're going to get roasted by a solar flare" wouldn't have been that much use so providing any warning at all was a bit pointless.

5. Nic says "the radiation from the solar flare will penetrate a thousand miles into the Earth's crust". I'm no expert but I don't think any form of radiation penetrates further than 50 feet or so into solid rock.

6. When the children are taken away we see perhaps 20 other spaceships leaving the earth. Any biologist will tell you that you need several hundred if not several thousand individuals to provide a stable genetic base for a population.

7. The children are taken by the aliens to an idyllic planet but are given two gigantic white rabbits to bring with them. It is unclear whether this is a snack or whether the aliens intend the planet to be a rabbit infested desert in about 20 years.

8. The children are dumped on the eden-planet with only the clothes they stand up in and no understanding of basic farming, fishing or anything useful. I predict that they'll last about a week, maybe two.

End Spoilerationism

Like most recent movies about an apocalypse this film tries to have it cake and eat it by showing the destruction of the planet but also having a hopeful message. In the end this was better than The Day the Earth Stood Bored – which isn't much of a recommendation.

Definitely this year's best Swedish vampire love story. Hopefully people will not consider this to be a spoiler as the blanket media coverage of the film has mostly referred to it as a vampire film.

Vampirism went out of vogue in the 1980's, returning with gusto in the mid to late 1990's. Thus there is an enormous amount opportunity for cliché in making a vampire film. Let the Right One In avoids almost all of them and presents an unusual story in a unique way. The cinematography of the film is stunning but it is outdone by the sound which is amazing. I'm not much for art films but this is a film that you could almost listen to rather than watch.

SPOILER

Oskar is an introverted, solitary 12 year old is being victimised at his school by a trio of bullies. He meets Eli (pronounced "ee-lee" rather than "eh-lee") a girl his own age who has just moved into the same block of flats. She is living with a creepy old man who is seen to be murdering teenagers and attempting to collect their blood. It quickly becomes apparent that Eli is a vampire, and the old man is her helper and possibly lover, though this is never explored.

A local man is killed when the old man botches a murder, loosing the blood that Eli needs to stay alive. After being discovered trying to find another victim the man attempts and fails to melt himself to death with acid and is captured.

Eli, forced to fend for herself, begins to befriend Oskar. Oskar eventually learns her secret – which doesn't phase him at all. I guess when you are twelve things like that are different – those kidz eh.

Oskar's friendship with Eli seems to give him enough courage to stand up to the bullies who've been making his life hell. You realise that this is radically different to an American film when, instead of backing off (which in Hollywood-world is what happens when you stand up to a bully), Oskar's tormentors recruit help to come back to make Oskar's life even more of a hell than it was before.

Eli does perhaps the most unknowingly cruel thing she can and kills the victimisers and rescues Oskar, he runs away with her and we realise that in sixty years or so he'll have become the man who originally arrived at the apartment block with Eli.

End Spoiler

Let the Right One In is mostly compatible with what might be called Stokerian tradition of vampirism. Vampires ares agelessly immortal, vulnerable to sunlight and can infect others with their curse/gift. They do however cast shadows and reflections. Whether they are afraid of crosses or other religious symbols is not explored. I mention this because I expect many people will take issue with this interpretation of vampirism not being "accurate". In fact the body of legend on vampires is enormous and highly divergent (take a look at the Wackypedia entry for vampires if you don't believe me) and an "accurate" approach is impossible.

In conclusion this is definitely worth seeing but do not expect an action epic or a traditional horror film, this is neither. The acting is superb, especially from the girl who plays Eli who (with some clever lighting) can go from looking like an innocent 12 year old to a ancient monster without having any prosthetics attached to her face or digital jiggery pokery.

Let the Right One In is a tale of horrifically tragic, doomed but innocent love.

The slightly depressing trend for "rebooting" older film series continues with this re-imagining of the origins of the original Star Trek crew. Having grown up with The Next Degradation, Voyeur and Deep Space Nine Inches I was expecting the standard po-faced, lumpen headed diplomacy that usually accompanies our forays into the universe of the United Federation of Plonkers.

Yes, you guessed it, I hate Star Trek. In my book there are two available options when you see an alien, either shooting it with a blaster (one that emphatically does NOT have a "stun" setting) or making it an ally in your fight against the tyrannical galaxy-spanning imperium you are rebelling against. Sitting down and negotitating with said alien whilst attempting to understand and respect it's culture simply isn't an option in my book.

Fortunately, Star Trek Begins is much more Undiscovered Country (or Khath of Wran, depending on your taste) than Final Frontier.

Spoiler In the opening sequence George Kirk (James' father) saves the lives of his ship's crew by heroically going to ramming speed against a sinister time traveling Romulan ship which emerges from a space anomaly. Said evil ship is piloted by the Hulk (not the Incredible Hulk, the other, arty one) sporting some natty facial tats. One of the crew George saves is his heavily pregnant wife who gives birth to James T during the escape.

We are treated to a short introduction to both Kirk (who is a total d*ck) and Spock before Kirk signs up for Starfleet at the urging of his father's friend, Captain Pike of the Enterprise.

After some fairly tiresome Starfleet Academy antics the film really gets going when the Enterprise is sent to investigate an anomaly similar to the one that killed Kirks father and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. The Hulk and his Romulan pals destroy a wave of Starfleet ships and then mash Vulcan using perhaps the most impractical super-weapon ever. This appears to involve lowering a big drill into the planets atmosphere and then waiting until it drills down to the core and dropping something down the hole. It is impressive that no one on Vulcan says "Oi, you with the tats! Stop drilling our planet or we'll blow you up and failing that we'll blow up your drill" but it doesn't really matter.

Spock, now captaining the Enterprise refuses Kirks plan to go head to head with the vastly superior baddie ship, when Kirk refuses to comply with the order Spock has him marooned on Hoth. By a coincidence of Godzilla like proportions Kirk is stranded on the planet where the original Spock (Nimoy) who's been thrown back in time along with the Romulans and is hiding out. By a rather universe breaking deus ex machina they end up back on the Enterprise, Kirk takes over as captain from Spock and saves the day by blowing old Hulky and his squid ship into a new black hole. Huzzay. Mr Spock (that's the old one not the young/new one) explains that as a result of the destruction of Vulcan they are now in a parallel dimension to the original crew. This means they can make new sequels or a new series and not have to worry about external continuity.

End Spoiler While I didn't like Chris Pine playing Kirk who made him seem rather unlikeable and emotionless everyone else is pretty good; Syler makes a convincing Spock, Uhura is likable if underused and Pegg's Scotty steals every scene he's in but the real shocker is Karl "Blood and Muscles" Urban's brilliant "Bones" McCoy who captures the spirit of the original brilliantly right up to and perhaps surpassing the inevitable "For God's sake, Jim, I'm a doctor not a...".

The film is however beset by a few issues. Blinding light and lens-flare all over the bloody place, nosebleed inducing sound and editing that isn't so much fast as psychotic. There's barely a frame in the film where there isn't some sort of lens-flare going off all over the place. Frankly if Kirk picked up a coffee cup there'd be lens-flare coming off it. Allied to this is the fact that for some reason virtually every scene ends with the entire screen slowly going blinding white. The sound team have obviously been influenced by the recent Star Wars films as everything makes some sort of incredible noise – this works to raise the adrenaline in the early part of the film but later on it becomes a bit too much. There is a fair amount of punching in this film (always good in a Star Trek movie) but the massively unrealistic two-pieces-of-wood-smacked-together punching noise beloved of Indiana Jones is rather out of place. The editing is very much the post-Generation-X attention-span-of-a-gnat type of affair that we're used to courtesy of people like Wachowski brothers but it is generally fairly simple to work out what is going on.

Minor stylistic issues aside, I enjoyed Star Trek. The plot is absolute rubbish but who cares? There are spaceships and explosions and punching and more explosions. Go with it and you wont notice that at the heart of the plot is a series of coincidences of galactic proportions.

I am exceedingly disappointed. I was expecting Tom "Bonzo" Cruise to be playing heroic all American hero Joe von Stauffenberg, who infiltrates German high command, kills Hitler, liberates Germany from the evil British Nazis and single handedly wins WWII for Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Instead I got an excellent thriller which manages to be both tense and exciting despite the fact that we all know exactly how it is going to end.

On a side note, I want to see more movies involving eye-patch-wearing Nazi's, after all, the eye-patched Nazi is surely the gold-standard of Nazidom.

Spoiler

Colonel von Stauffenberg (Cruise) returns from North Africa missing an eye, a hand and a couple of fingers convinced that the war is lost and peace must be made. He is recruited by von Tresckow (a criminally underused Brannagh) to join the staff of fellow German Resistance leader General Olbrecht (Nighy). Stuaffenberg's plan is to kill Hitler and subvert Operation Valkyrie to allow the conspirators to seize power, in effect using Hitler's own plan against him.

After one failed attempt von Stauffenberg successfully detonates a bomb at Hitler's command bunker, the Wolfs-Lair, which he believes has killed Hitler and returns to Berlin to discover that Olbrecht has refused to initial Valkyrie without confirmation that Hitler is dead. As a result the plan is three hours late. Before it is complete communications have been restored to the command bunker and rumours start to circulate that Hitler is alive. From this point on von Stauffenberg's coup is doomed as Hitler is able to personally assures military commanders and the country as a whole that he is alive, exposing Stauffenberg's plot and halting Valkyrie in it's tracks. Soon afterward von Stauffenberg and the other key conspirators are shot by firing squad after a hasty court-martial.

End Spoiler

The (mostly British) cast is absolutely top-notch with great turns by Bill Nighy, Kenneth Brannagh, Tom Wilkinson and even Eddie Izzard (doing well in a non-comic role). Nighy's conflicted, indecisive Olbrecht is stands out particularly but probably only because he has the most screen time after Cruise. Despite thinking that he's about as sane as a Lord Such on mescaline, I have to admit that Cruise can act and here he is excellent as the embittered war hero, determined that treason is the only solution.

If the film has a problem it is that the ending is so inevitable and feels so unnecessary (due to all the conspirators missed opportunities) that I found myself thinking that I'd almost have rather seen the film about what would have happened if the plot had succeeded, or even, dare I say it, Joe Stauffenberg as one man vs. the English Reich.

There was once a little game that could called Portal (or possibly pOrtal if one is being acne-burstingly nerdy) which involved fighting a crazed supercomputer called GLADOS. Eagle Eye is the same thing but with all the joy and, most damningly, all the deliciously black humour surgically removed. Eagle Eye boils down to two strangers being dragged into a puppy-eatingly insane series of adventures by a supercomputer bent on... well, it's never clear exactly what GLADOS... sorry, ARIA is bent on – but she's pretty damn bent on it, that's for certain.

Eagle Eye has been so carefully emasculated of all political sensibilities that it is impossible to tell if it is a authoritarian critique of liberalism or a liberal critique of authoritarianism or possibly both at the same time. You can read it either way. It's so cynical that you have to kind of admire it.

--Spoiler--

Shia LaBouf and the unstoppably gorgeous Michelle Moighnaghanghg (can't seem to set the spell checker to "Oirish") are two strangers thrown together by a mellifluous voice on the end of the phone that threatens, cajoles and conspires to get them to undertake a series of increasingly ludicrous set-pieces so they can do do a high-tech ctrl-alt-del on ARIA a computer system so smart that it can track every cellphone globally and so mind-bendingly dumb that it didn't back itself up to it's satellite before having the liquid nitrogen drained from its cooling system.

I must just have a brief aside on the subject of liquid nitrogen cooling systems because it's becoming more and more common in films. Computer gone mad? Quick! Drain the liquid nitrogen cooling system. Frankly we're all screwed if it turns out that Skynet has a big heat-sink and some fans. Liquid nitrogen cooling is great if you're the kind of person who gets off on posting the number of gigadonks that your computer can do on a fundamentally anonymous internet forum but here's an alternate strategy, MAKE IT UP! My computer runs at 1.23 bazillion megaflunks, now worship me you filthy reptiles!

Anyway back to the plot... just in time to find it's been replaced with explosions. Quite good explosions one has to say. I like an explosion as much as the next retarded idiot who can tell the difference between a Grock 17 and a Grock 21 just by the noise it makes, but a good film explosions do not make. After the requisite blowing up of stuff our heroes penetrate the core of the computer system so easily that it makes one wonder why ARIA bothered with all the stuff leading up to that. They disable the safety protocols so that she can enact her plan to kill the entire command structure of the USA with a plot so unbelievably dumb that the machine must have a degree in stupid plotting from the University of Stupid (formerly Stupid Polytechnic, formerly World of Leather).

Needless to say the plan doesn't work and eventually ARIA gets killed by being stabbed in her metaphorical computer face. This is like the scene in old films where someone shoots the monitor of a computer and it shuts down instead of just carrying on what it was doing only without the funky black and green graphics. I tell you the world is going to be in trouble when I come up with my super duper killer robots which have their brains in their left kneecap because everyone will be shooting them in the head and later, as they're being genetically altered into the lizards with computers slower than mine, wondering why the blasted things wouldn't die.

--End Spoiler--

Despite everything I've just said I really enjoyed Eagle Eye. It had exactly the right mixture of explosions and Michelle Mognaganahaganahan (GRAAARGH!) to keep me entertained for two hours or so. You know how 300 was a like a commentary on the war on terror by someone who'd been injecting stupid-crack straight into their eyes? Well, Eagle Eye is like a critique of the surveillance culture by a spectacularly ADD 8 year old who cant decide if it's, like, the coolest thing ever or the worst thing since they took Super Mega Bandai Power Gruntles off the air.

I want to close on Billy Bob's teeth. What the hell was going on there? I don't want to be insulting (really, who am I kidding) but it looks as if someone drove a grand piano into his mouth at top speed. It was horrible, it felt like his teeth were following me around the theatre.

I know people will get upset when I say this but this film bored the ever-living hell out of me. Personally I think that we need another three hour (actually it was 90 minutes but it felt like three hours) dull-fest about the holocaust like we need a hole in the head.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the holocaust was an atrocity of proportions so staggering that it is difficult to conceive. And that is partly the point. I cannot empathise with the people in the death camps, surely no one who wasn't there could. I understand on a purely intellectual level that the suffering was unimaginable - UNIMAGINABLE, as in not possible to imagine, at all, ever.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas follows Bruno, the young son of a senior Nazi, as his family moves to the country where his father put in charge of running what the boy initially thinks is a farm of some kind. Exploring, Bruno meets (through an electric fence) a Jewish boy of his own age and the two talk. Despite fine acting on the part of the two central child actors the film is meaningless and unrealistic. Sadly it follows the unerringly "safe" route of so many films of its type by showing us the horror with none of the insight. It has the usual cast of "goodies" who are unaware of, shocked by or victims of the holocaust and the "baddies" who are monstrous almost inhuman figures whose motivations remain unknown and unexplored. Even as he is being led to the denouement the protagonist remains wilfully ignorant of the nature of the camp that his father is running which is not only stupid but actually quite insulting.

The mistake that lies at the core of films like Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Schindler's List and twenty other films about the holocaust is that they concentrate on the suffering of the victims of the holocaust to the exclusion of all else. Implying that we can, in even the tiniest way, empathise with people who went through this experience diminishes the pain of those who did. They place us in the metal position of the victim, unable to affect the outcome of this terror while ignoring the far harder truth, that what we should be frightened of is not victimisation but becoming the victimisers. By showing us only the horror of the people in the camps films like this one run the risk of allowing us to forget the horror that we could be the ones running them.

The central message of the film appears to be that the holocaust was bad - really, really bad. Good God, it's sixty years afterwards, is there anyone out there who doesn't know that by now? Is there a man, woman or child on the planet who wouldn't recognise a picture of Aldof Hitler as The Most Evil Man Ever (TM) and be aware of his attempted murder of an entire race? I somewhat doubt it.

If you want to see a truly gut-wrenchingly terrifying film about the holocaust watch the little known HBO TV movie Conspiracy (2001) starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. That film contains not a single gunshot or image of the holocaust and yet can, quite justifiably in my opinion, claim to be both the best WWII movie ever made and the most coldly horrifying examination of humanity's capacity for evil. Stacked against that, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is quasi-feel good holocaust tourism.

As an alternative to Rendition you could create some form of power-point presentation showing a picture of Jake Gyllenhal with the words "TORTURE=BAD" flashing on and off every second or so. Then you could watch it for two and a half hours. It would be slightly more enlightening and a lot more entertaining than Rendition.

--Spoiler--

Naughty terrorists blow up a market place in an unsuccessful attempt to kill a senior Egyptian police officer and killing Jake Gyllenhall's friend in the process. Because all the planes in America are currently being used for rendition flights the CIA cant send out a replacement for the dead bloke and tell Jake that he has to do the job despite not being a field agent.

A man is stopped at customs while getting off a flight from South Africa and then kidnapped by the US security services. He's an Egyptian chemical engineer who's suspected of having ties with the terrorists behind the marketplace bombing. He's innocent. We know this because he's married to preggers all-American blonde Reese Witherspoon.

After refusing to admit to being a terrorist the Egyptian is renditioned (rendited? rendified?) to Egypt for water-boarding. I always think that it sounds like some kind of sport. I expect to see pictures of happy people surfing with the slogan "Go Waterboarding With the Family" or some such. Anyway -insert generic Arabic sounding name here- is sent to the prison camp run by the police officer and tortured while Jake looks on with mounting horror and increasing conviction that the Egyptian is innocent.

In the meanwhile we see a sub-plot about the policeman's teen-aged daughter being seduced by a bloke who is going to lots of "Allahu Akbar" type meetings. There is also the sub-plot involving Reese trying to get the American government to admit to kidnapping her husband for torture.

Eventually the Egyptian gives up the names of his "comrades" who turn out to be the 1974 Egyptian national football (soccer) side. "Brilliant!" I thought, "Now we get to see ageing footballers having the electricity applied to their nipples." But sadly it wasn't to be. Jake gives in and rescues the Egyptian, presumably loosing his job in the process.

To cut a needlessly long story sideways we eventually find out that the daughter's boyfriend was the suicide bomber from the beginning of the film and that the policeman doesn't realise that his daughter died in the same incident. Bummer, that'll teach him for being a nasty torturer then.

--End Spoiler--

The film falls into the terrifying category of films that want to make you a better person. I can just about tolerate it when it's a film about some horrible abuse that I don't know about but really, anyone who doesn't disagree with the policy of extraordinary rendition either: A) doesn't care; B) thinks all brown people should be tortured on general principle; or, C) couldn't spell extraordinary, let alone know what rendition means.

In the end this film is a bit like Syriana which spent about 7 hours shocking us with the massive revelation that "the oil business is a bit shady". Rendition is a non film about a non issue (given that extraordinary rendition stopped about 2 years ago). Hollywood can make all the movies it likes about these sorts of injustices and it wont make a blind bit of difference because the people who agree with, don't know about or don't care about the policy wont see this film and those that do see it will already share the film makers moral outrage about the issue and will tut and carry on eating their organic, sustainably produced, hand knitted hummus.

This latest Bond is a collection of pretty poorly organised set pieces strung together by a plot that is actually made of holes. I didn't like Casino Royale With Cheese much but I respected the intention behind it. I still think they should have just called it "Bourne Begins" and had done with it but then (thank God) I don't work in UA's marketing department. Having said that, I liked Craig as Bond and I was looking forward to this film in the hope that they could do something different to Casino. They did. Sadly not in a good way.

Craig has none of the panache or wit he displayed in Casino and while I respect Kurilenko's artistry (in removing all clothing at every opportunity) I don't think she's a great actress and not even a great Bond girl. Dench comes off as indecisive, one minute she's condemning Bond the next supporting him. None of this is the actors fault who, I think, do as much as they can with what they have but what they do have is minimal.

--Spoiler--

Starting moments after the end of the last film Bond is chased to Siena with the captured Mr White in the boot of his car. White promptly escapes courtesy of M's bodyguard who, it turns out, was actually Mr Deus E. MacHina. Bond pursues him across the rooftops of Siena before they both fall into a big Heath Robinson / Rube Goldberg machine and Bond kills him.

Chasing a money trail to Haiti, Bond decides to rescue noted Bolivian Irina Androvnova Norkoutski from the clutches of the evil General Belgrano who's kidnapped her at the behest of her boyfriend Mr Green, Mr White's colleague. Sadly Messrs Teal, Magenta and Cyan wont be appearing until the next film. The General wants Mr Green's money to finance his coup in Bolivia. He's spotted that, after about 30 years of universal suffrage, free elections and political stability, what the Bolivians really want is another bloody great civil war.

The Americans (now taking over from the British as the world's bad guys) have agreed to recognise the General as the head of the Bolivian government if they can have the oil that they believe Mr Green has found under the Bolivian desert. Bond follows Green to Austria and listens in on a board meeting of SMERSH... sorry SPECTRE... sorry, Quantum. During his escape he appears to have killed a special branch bodyguard and is disavowed. He recruits his colleague Mathis (from Casino)and the two of them head off to Bolivia where they are met by Totty McDoomed (Gemma Arterton, fresh from critical pannage in unilateral sh1tfest St Trinians), an attractive attaché from the British Consulate. The film makers, wisely realising that it takes too much effort to write sexy, witty dialogue, have Bond seduce Totty in one of the most ludicrous moments in film history. Bond and Totty go up to his suite and Bond says "I cant find the stationary" and in the next scene he and Totty are in bed together. Yer-what!? It's like a badly made porno without the money shot. Did I miss the memo about the pant-dampening eroticism of stationary? As a man, do I fail to see Bond's smouldering seductiveness? This is a moment that achieves new heights in the pantheon of lazy writing.

Bond gets hold of a plane and with Irina in tow goes in search of Mr Green's proxy and discover that Green's been collecting water not oil. It's lucky for him that Bolivia only has one source of water because otherwise it might be difficult to corner the entire country's supply.

Returning to the hotel, Totty has been drowned in oil. For why, we are never told. Possibly Green is just kinky that way but given that it's already been established that his plan involves water not oil it's a strange choice. Bond doesn't have time to lament the loss of another of the world's great stationary fetishists because the CIA want him dead. He escapes and, for reasons too secret to let the audience in on, knows to chase Green and the General to a hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert. It turns out that the Hotel, built on sustainable environmental principles is also the worlds most flammable building so Bond sets it on fire. Take that environmentalism! I'm not a massive environmentalist (as can be judged by the fact that I normally leave the "environ" out when using the word) but I cannot help but think that this is some crazed subconscious attack on the whole movement by the writer. Perhaps his father was killed by some particularly "live" yogurt.

While the building collapses Bond kills some people and cripples Green. Camille kills the General. Bond maroons Green in the middle of the desert with a only can of motor oil to drink presumably in recompense for drowning Totty in the stuff.

Finally Bond goes to Russia and find's dead ex Vespa's boyfriend who is busy seducing a new target. Bond has the boyfriend arrested and forgives Vespa for betraying him in Casino.

--Spoiler--

Quantum of Balls has the realism of Moonraper, the originality of Never Say Hairpiece Again, the acting of On Her Majesties Big Pile of Australian Pants, the continuity of The World Is Not ADD Enough, and all the style of Octopieceofeck. It's sort of a "perfect storm" of bad Bond films. Frankly it should be avoided like the plague.

M Night Shallamallamannamanallamana invites us to witness the next circuit of the downward spiral of his career. To say that The Happening is a bad film is an insult to bad films. Barring three good scenes, two at the beginning and one at the end, this film is awful.

*Spoiler* Marky Mark, a biology teacher is having problems with his girlfriend who may or may not be having an affair. You have to wonder if this has happened to M Night Shamelessman since this plot detail goes into almost every movie he makes. Perhaps he stopped reading after the chapter which said "Creating drama through relationship problems" in his copy of "Introduction to Film-making".

People in parks in New York and Philadelphia commit mass suicide in two very effective scenes at or near the beginning of the film. At first people think it is a terrorist attack and the cities are evacuated. Apparently there is a neurotoxin going around which shuts down the brain's "self preservation function", clearly there are lots of Americans wondering what it is like to shoot yourself in the head as these people don't just become a bit careless they go off on the whole Goth-self-harm kick in a big way.

Marky, his wife, best friend and best friend's daughter get on a train heading out of Philadelphia. After stopping in Sodomy PA the best friend leaves to find his wife, runs into the toxin and tops himself leaving Marky, his wife and the orphaned girl.

This is an apposite time to discuss what I suspect is M. Night Sillysod's primary reason for making this film, namely lashings and lashings of suicide-porn. We get everything here, people shooting themselves, stabbing themselves, slitting their wrists, jumping off buildings, hanging themselves and, memorably, lying down in front of a lawnmower. If you're considering suicide (and after watching this film you'd be forgiven for doing so) this movie really will give you a good idea of the options.

Marky works out that the neurotoxin is being released by the plants (biology teachers do that, right?) – and suddenly all those menacing shots of trees moving in the wind make sense; THE PLANTS ARE EVIL.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen this is the twist, apparently the plants have decided that we're a threat and have decided to eliminate us. As far as twists go this one is about as good as the one at the end of any book for children under the age of 4 ("Wow! Spot found his ball! What a twist!"). Frankly this film could have been improved by including a scene with a tree sitting in leather armchair wearing a smoking jacket saying "I am, of course, delightfully mad!".

I am not a huge fan of films with twist endings, once you've seen such a film it is like a magic trick where you only see how it is done. Shallimoon's range of twists is fairly laughable in itself and includes the famous "Oh my, you mean Bruce Willis, who clearly died in the first scene, is actually dead?!" (Sixth Sense), the immortal "Gosh, I can't believe that the baddie is the only other recognisable actor in the film!" (Unbreakable) and the completely epic "Oh my god, they're Amish?!" (The Village). Mind you none have yet beaten the mind-blowing "Oh my god there's no twist!" from Lady in the Water which was actually quite surprising, although not really in a good way.

Immediately after the homicidal plant revelation the companions are chased by the wind. No, that's not a euphemism for the after effects of a particularly powerful curry and nine pints of beer, I mean that they actually spend some time running away from the wind which may be carrying lethal suicide inducing toxins. It's a funny thing about wind that it is normally difficult to decide where a particular bit of it starts or stops at a particular point. The film makers solve this by flying a helicopter near the ground but just out of shot so that the wind has a nice clean edge so that the characters can run away from it properly.

Eventually Marky, wifey and the child end up in a sort of micro-brew deliverance where they are threatened by lady-redneck who is, at turns, nice and psychotic. No problem, she's got by the evil wind-plant duo. Then, the whole problem just goes away and our heroes are okay. The final scene of the film replicates the mass suicide ones from the beginning but this time in France so we know that it isn't over yet. Perhaps this lays the foundations for "The Happening 2: Still Happening" - they should make this as a screwball comedy with Ben Stiller having been affected by the neurotoxin but unable to decide what method of suicide to use... with HILARIOUS CONSEQUENCES! *End Spoiler* This film really is dreadful. The acting is embarrassing and the script is awful. Possibly the only redeeming feature is that M Night Shantbeappearinginthisfilm doesn't make an appearance.

1/10

Mindlessness rules in this super-bonkers piece of nonsense from (most of the) team who brought you brilliantly foolish guns-and-werewolves movie Dog Soldiers. As my title suggests, I think Neil Marshall wrote the film by watching 4 TVs simultaneously playing Mad Max, The Warriors, 28 Days Later and Escape from New York.

What I am saying sounds like a criticism but it really isn't. Doomsday is fun. It probably isn't the sum of the films that went into the blender to make it but somehow it manages to make you go with it. This is predictable rubbish of the worst kind and yet you'll find yourself enjoying it.

*not really a spoiler*

A terrifying plague has broken out in Glasgow and spread to the rest of Scotland. Despite England's avowed refusal to deep fry all food stuffs, the Scots are looking to escape. But no! Evil Scotland-hating England has rebuilt Hadrian's Wall out of cargo containers, and elected to let the Scots die alone rather than become infected themselves.

30 years later a child survivor of the plague - Eden Sinclair (the British Milla Jovavitch – Rhona Mitra; stonkingly gorgeous but apparently incapable of acting her way out of a wet paper bag) is all growed up and now face-shoots people as Major in the police. After a suspected outbreak of the plague in London Prime Minister Gaius Baltar, and his gravel-voiced Alastair Campbell-alike – Canaris, tell Rhona to hop it over to bonny Scotland and find a cure for the virus.

Much nuttery then ensues involving, but not limited to; exploding rabbits, tanks, squashed cows, synchronised arse-slapping, human-cooking, decapitation, cannibalism, decapitation, steam trains, medieval knights, King Lear, trial by combat, a Bentley GT, a gimp-o-cycle, more decapitation and a not-very-surprising double cross.

*end spoiler*

Doomsday may be completely derivative hokum but it has an élan, a joie de vivre that is lacking from so many other films (most with vastly bigger budgets). Inventiveness can be an overrated quality, after all a dried rat sandwich is pretty inventive but it doesn't necessarily make it good food. I started watching it thinking "well, I've seen all this before" and I had – but if you let your brain freewheel you'll enjoy it. It hasn't got a message and it doesn't want to make you think. If you watch it looking to nit-pick every small detail of the film so that you can legitimately hate it then, guess what, you wont enjoy it, and that would be a shame – this is a film that wants to be enjoyed.

The special effects deserve a mention as it is nice to see big special effects that don't rely solely on CGI. There is some but mostly it's good old makeup, modeling and pyrotechnics. I'd like to see more movies using this approach since done well it is far more convincing.

Doomsday isn't: Inventive, Original, Enormously coherent, Full of CGI, lacking a sense of humour.

Doomsday is: Enjoyable, Gory, Good fun.

Nowadays I only give two ratings on IMDb, 1 or 10 on the principle that I either enjoyed a film or I didn't and trying to rank stuff is impossibly subjective. Despite initial worries Doomsday thoroughly entertained me and earns a 10. If you are willing to let yourself be entertained the film is a lot of fun, if you only watch movies in which people sit around and discuss the meaning of existence (optionally in French) then it's probably not one for you.

Wow, that was forgettable. In fact having got home from watching it I still can't really remember what happened. This is the colour beige in cinematic form. I'd give it some sort of score but given that I have only the haziest recollections of the film I don't think it would be fair.

*spoiler*

Rick (Brendan Frazer - without any of the energy he displayed even in the admittedly fairly bad second Mummy film) and Evelyn O'connell (Rachel Weisz - who seems to have changed somewhat since I last saw her in a movie and not in a good way) get recruited by the FO to take some gee-gaw back to China where their son, who seems to be a bit older than either of them, is digging up a big terracotta Jet Li. Oh... and that bloke who was really annoying in "Four Weddings and a Plastic American Lady" has a role as an annoying bloke in this film as well.

It turns out that a pair of naughty communists (one sporting a Blowfeld style scar and the other who is the most western looking Chinese bloke I've ever seen - complete with a blond goatee) have a plan to raise Jet Li and get him to rule the world as an autocratic emperor - those crazy communists, eh? Every time you think you've got them worked out they come up with something surprising; like Marxist equality... under the rule of an immortal god-king. Excellent, seems logical to me.

Fortunately some CGI yeti...

Is yeti also the plural? Like sheep? Or cannon? Do you say "a herd of yeti" or "a herd of yetis"? Is there a collective noun? Is it "a peak of yeti"? Or maybe "a howl of yeti"? I don't know; but that line of enquiry did keep me from falling into a boredom induced coma during the film.

...anyway, where was I? Oh yes... Michelle Yeoh and her sexy daughter and their tame yeti's have a plan to... Oh for god's sake! I really couldn't care less.

There's lots of sturm und drang and big fight at the end but frankly I don't think it was working as I think I heard a few snores from other parts of the (mostly) empty cinema.

*end spoiler

Pros: It wasn't Indiana Jones 4

Cons: Everything else

Just as an ending aside, I really liked the comment from the person who said, with great indignation in their review "you know, the Terracotta Warriors aren't really made of people!" as if this was some kind of massive revelation. I love the surrealism of ignoring all the other gigantic plot holes and going for the one thing in this film that probably couldn't be counted as a plot hole. Brilliant!

This film really is wish fulfilment of the worst and most degrading kind. This was "created" by the same man who shat the unbelievably bad Night Watch on an unsuspecting world, this is a film that you can genuinely feel making you stupider as you watch it.

Spoiler

James MacAvoy has a rubbish job and an unpleasant best friend who is having an affair with his annoying girlfriend. Fortunately is recruited by a group of uber-assassins descended from weavers. In the 10th century these weavers discovered binary code and a method for "reading" their weaving. I can just imagine how that one went:

Oi, Yorrick!I've discovered a way to read the weaving

Really, what does it say?

It's a name.

Brilliant, clearly we should kill them. Weavers do that right?

Not content with coming up with the worlds dumbest method for finding targets they also enjoy making life difficult for themselves. They've discovered a way to bend bullets in mid flight and this allows them to be significantly more crap than regular assassins. There is one particularly spiffing scene where James and Ms Jolie (who spends the whole film looking like a particularly unwell bag of coat-hangers with tattoos that classily scream "crack whore") assassinate someone in a boardroom from the top of a moving train. Given that one character can shoot people from five miles away with a special flintlock rifle I am wondering why just sitting across the street with a regular hunting rifle was out of the question for these idiots.

Morgan Freeman (new conservatory Mr F?) phones in his worst performance ever as the completely bored leader of the weaver assassins (they also make clothes). He needs James to kill the rogue agent who killed James' father.

The whole thing plays out with with the same sense of relentless invention and excitement you'd get watching dogs mating.

End Spoiler

Frankly if there is one film this year that you should avoid seeing, it should be Wanted. I am however happy to see that director Timur Talentless-Hackovitch is clearly influenced by the early work of that master of w*nk Uwe Boll. With Wanted, however, he has graduated from incomprehensible gibberish (any of the Night-, Day-, Twilight-, Just after Dawn-, Thirteen minutes to Noon-watch films) to unredeemable crap. In a few years time he may have just about learned how to make something that is simply laughably bad.