Total Recall - The Total Remake

Let's initially give the 2012 remake of Total Recall a pass on being a remake of the 1990 Arnie film and also for the somewhat questionable elements of the premise - namely the ability to construct "The Fall", a tunnel that goes through the CENTRE OF THE EARTH but not create more housing... With that out of the way, let's begin, shall we?

The film starts with textual exposition on the world before we cut to Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) having a dream about a mysterious woman (Jessica Biel) and him, trying to escape robots from Mass Effect. He wakes up to see his hot wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale) and bemoans his boring life. He's located in the "The Colony" (which is in Australia - but looks like a mix of Bangkok and Hong Kong if they got fused with Blade Runner on steroids and for some reason, has to commute to the United Federation of Britain which is the only other place in the world that is still habitable (because of some kind of nuclear/chemical/biological war at the end of the 21st century). As if living in a post-apocalyptic world wasn't bad enough, trouble is brewing between the UFB and the resistance (led by Bill Nye) - whose goals and motivations are never really explained beyond being there to oppose the UFB.

Quaid continues to express his discontent to his best friend Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) and mentions that he's thinking about going to "Rekall", to have memories implanted. Harry tells him that this is a bad idea but another co-worker says it was super special awesome! He also gets turned down for a promotion - despite having put in lots of extra work and his boss telling him that he's better qualified but the other guy got the job as he's from the UFB.

Quaid wastes some talking to Harry at a bar, where he again gets warned against going to "Rekall" and FINALLY, at the twenty minute mark (after a very random scene paying homage to the infamous three breasted woman in the original), Quaid gets to "Rekall" where we have a John Cho cameo that is pretty much wasted and something ACTUALLY happens.

So, seconds after Quaid is strapped into the chair - a bunch of soldiers burst in and shoot everyone except Quaid. He's able to Jason Bourne them to death (although, with direction and editing that not only doesn't induce seizures but actually allows you to see what's going on!) a second team turns up before he manages to escape and heads home to see his wife... who responds by trying to kill him. Marriage ain't what it used to be... She immediately spills her guts and tells him that their marriage is an implanted memory and she's a secret agent there to keep an eye on him before he runs off again.

A phone in his hand rings and an old friend - called Hammond - tells him that he needs to go check out an old safety deposit box and get rid of the phone. Apparently cutting a hand phone out is easy though, all you need is a piece of broken glass and it comes right out! So, he goes to get the safety deposit box which is full of all kinds of things that help progress the plot - namely a video of himself, telling him to go to his old apartment in the UFB... he doesn't seem to question how the video got to the safety deposit box despite the fact it ends with him GETTING CAPTURED.

As should be obvious, what happens next is another chase sequence (after a joke only people that have watched the original will get) this one feeling very Minority Report influenced with cars moving vertically as well as horizontally. During this long and rather dull sequence, Jessica Biel is able to turn up at JUST the right time to save Quaid but she gets injured (as she is but a weak and feeble woman) and he has to carry her to his old apartment. He activates a message from himself that basically explains that Quaid is actually Hauser, someone in the UFB who defected to the resistance and had a kill-code for the synthetics that Cohagen was going to use to invade the Colony - handy for the rebels!

Police are surrounding the building and Harry tries to convince Quaid that this is all just a delusion brought on by the memory implantation and that to escape, he has to shoot Jessica Biel for uh, some reason - it's not explained... Instead, also for no adequately explained reason, her tearing up leads him to shoot Harry in the face and despite the fact the opening scene of the film shows us that there exists a very effective non-lethal takedown, Quaid and Jessica Biel manage to escape (despite being surrounded) via another - you guessed it! - long and tedious chase scene involving Willy Wonka lifts. YAWN.

To give us a break from this, Quaid gets to see Bill Nye - sporting an American accent but we'll get to that shortly. They try and get the kill-code from Quaid but faster than you can say "IT'S A TRAP!" the storm troopers have busted in and killed everyone and Quaid's faux wife (who has been trying to murder him the whole film despite orders not to) and Chancellor Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston) are there for good measure. Heinsenberg delivers a big dollop of exposition, this was all just a means to kill Bill Nye and launch the invasion of The Colony. Sadly, there is no evil laugh... but he instructs his soldiers to restore Quaid to his original personality and to take Jessica Biel with him on his invasion of The Colony (because all invasions are led by politicians with dangerous rebels along for the ride).

Taking a leaf right out of the Doctor Evil handbook, everyone leaves except for a couple of guys... even though there is NO rush to invade The Colony and it would make a lot more sense to just sit here and make sure they restored Quaid to Hauser... but nope, they all leave and apparently Hammond was one to go above and beyond the call of duty because he's there and loosens Quaid's straps - what a stroke of luck!

Hammond gets shot when Quaid is freeing himself - too bad, so sad - and then rushes off to The Fall to rescue Jessica Biel and stop Chancellor Heinsenberg from invading The Colony. How best to achieve this? BOMBS! Lots of bombs. Shame no one in the resistance was clever enough to come up with such an ingenuous plan before... so predictable as ever, Quaid frees Jessica Biel and after a pointless fight scene to pad the already overly long run time - we get a fake-out where Quaid is unconscious and wakes up to Lori pretending to be Jessica Biel... no explanation as to why she didn't just kill him while he was asleep but that's it.

This film has a lot of problems but most of it comes down to the pacing and the flat characters. The chase sequences are quite often quite visually impressive but as the characters are so unengaging, there's just no real reason to care what happens. Farrell phones in his performance - spending most of the film looking surprised but neither Biel nor Beckinsale do much better, struggling to muster two facial expressions between them. Given that we take a full twenty minutes to get to the action part, this is especially inexcusable.

The pacing is also very off, this film is only two hours long but it feels a lot longer. Some scenes - such as when Quaid goes to Rekall - feel as if they're too short and the action scenes almost all feel overly long, becoming rather numbing... On top of this, there's no real sense of scale or anything at stake. We've no real idea who the resistance are or what they want, we just know the UFB are the cartoonish bad guys and that the invasion is bad... for some reason.

About all you can say is that it looks nice and even that is somewhat backhanded as the visual style is really just a collage of designs out right lifted from other better films. Even without comparison to the original, this is a subpar action film that just falls flat.

Cowboys & Aliens

Genre mixing and versus battles are all the rage these days. Pirates vs. ninjas, zombies vs. anything and now Cowboys vs. Aliens.

There REALLY isn't a lot to say about this film - it's very much a case of "does exactly what it says on the tin". You've got the Wild West setting with cowboys and injuns and then - BOOM! ALIENS!

Daniel Craig - with plot convenient/lazy writing amnesia and a bracelet that fires lasers - and Harrison Ford are the driving forces here but there's no real characterisation. Harrison Ford is a gruff cattle rancher with a pissant son (who gets abducted) and about all his character does is say that he looks at a native American guy is like his REAL son. Daniel Craig is suffering movie grade amnesia and is plagued with a severe case of flashbacks... it's nothing that hasn't been done a hundred times before and as always, it's just a case of the writer either not having the talent or inclination to write something better. He's a bad ass with a criminal past - that he can't remember - and the only weapon that works against the aliens.

After the aliens have abducted a bunch of people from the town, Indiana Jones and James Bond get a posse together and head out to find the aliens and that's really the meat of the film. We find out that the aliens are there FOR GOLD... which... doesn't really make a lot of sense. If you're capable of interstellar travel and can detect gold from orbit... why the hell do you want to waste all the time and energy of going down into a gravity well as big as Earth? Just go asteroid mining! And if you're thinking "aliens coming to Earth for our gold... that sounds familiar!" that'll be because it was the plot for the cinematic masterpiece known as Battlefield: Earth.

Also, the reason for the abductions is apparently because the aliens want to find out our weaknesses. This kind of thing always strikes me as silly. Unless you're going to develop biological agents SPECIFICALLY for humans, it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that humans are incredibly frail. We're meatbags that can die by falling down a flight of stairs - it's not like we're Kryptonians or Terminators, we die REAL easy. There is the insinuation that the aliens will also descend en masse to wipe humanity out - there's no explanation given, that's apparently just how these aliens roll.

So, naturally after following a wounded alien, they manage to find their ship and decide to engage in what might as well have been dubbed "operation suicide", which is basically most of the people riding around outside the ship and getting massacred by the nigh invulnerable aliens, that are apparently capable of just ripping people apart... all of this after they recognise that they want to keep to the high ground.

Naturally though, main characters are immune and Han Solo and James Bond are fine, aliens are killed and that's about it. Very average.

John Carter Of Mars

John Carter of Mars - the live action Disney adaptation of the oldie timey work of the same name - is likely to be remembered for how catastrophically it tanked at the box office, putting it up there with other similarly high outlay/low return flops as Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in the Disney hall of shame...

The thing is - as with Treasure Planet and Atlantis which between them pretty much killed off Disney's traditional animated features for a decade - John Carter of Mars... isn't bad. It's actually considerably better than either of those two offerings but it's really not good either.

There's nothing that sticks out as memorable beyond the visuals. Despite clocking in at two hours, there's no real investment in any of the characters and there's never any real suspense or tension. Not to mention that the fish out of water device isn't particularly well used - John Carter arrives on Mars and seems to work it all out pretty quickly and once a magical plot device (never explained) allows him to understand the language of the people on Mars, it's all pretty straight forward. The strange thing about the universal translator is that it doesn't translate the weird words and so, almost half the dialogue is people saying silly words or names.

There's nothing wrong with that occasionally but the words in question are just so ridiculous that it makes it hard to take it seriously... and the film plays it very straight, that alone makes the film feel rather stilted which is worsened by the pacing. Really, the two hour run time does drag and it feels as if this could have been cut down to ninety minutes and it would have been for the better.

It feels as if this really WANTED to be a kind of fun sci-fi romp - possibly in the manner of Pirates of the Caribbean - but it got bogged down in the source material. The plot is pretty straight forward - John Carter dicks around a bit to give us some minor character development and then ends up on Mars, find out he's super strong and can jump like a kangaroo on steroids and saves a princess...

This princess is not only hot (pretty much a given) AND a super science boffin (having discovered the "ninth ray", which is apparently super special awesome) but is also an accomplished sword fighting bad ass, so... she's a keeper. Anyway, evil shapeshifting monks want McNulty from The Wire to marry her, allowing them to rule the planet... or something, the motivations of the "Thurn" are never really explained beyond vague insinuation that once they've got a puppet ruler on Mars, they'll turn their attention toward Earth.

Anyway, John Carter and the princess run away from the four armed green guys, find out the plans of the evil shapeshifting monks (because apparently a race capable of instantaneous interplanetary travel don't know about passwords) and have the mandatory chases and escapes. It's all very paint by numbers and really, there's just nothing to set this apart from the crowd and the ending just feels like clunky framing with obvious sequel baiting for a sequel that will never come.

It's not good, it's not bad... it's just average and despite some nice visuals, it's easily forgettable. Something to watch when you're not really feeling like paying a lot of attention, really.

Time was, when the world was ending... it would end in America. Usually involving nukes, American soldiers or teens... or people and somehow, amazingly - things would clear right up when (their) red, white and blue was flying again etc. etc. Or not.

In recent years though, for some reason, it seems the British isles have become subject to the apocalypse. Be it infertility or viruses, the United Kingdom seems to be where it's at in terms of destruction and death... it makes a kind of sense. Britain allows for a contained environment for the apocalypse to play out but the rest of the world to be unaffected... or at least, such was the case in 28 Days Later...

Doomsday revisits the same basic idea as 28 Days Later - DEADLY VIRUS! Except this one just happens to be particularly virulent rather than turning people into flailing, murderous red eyed zombies... just kills them in a rather unpleasant way. So, after the outbreak in Glasgow someone thinks it's a great idea to just wall off Scotland and hope that fixes everything... Nuking Glasgow was probably a better prospect but oh well... Apparently this solution works just super until 20 years later, there's an outbreak of the virus in the now terminally overcrowded London and the PM sends generic crack troops in to find a cure.

As it turns out, things on the other side of the wall have gone Mad Max/Lord of the Flies... the total breakdown of social order and reversion of a sort of feudal existence... with some cannibalism thrown in... Plenty of the people die when the cannibalistic inhabitants of Glasgow ambush the APCs the team is in and naturally, they're on the menu but eventually the handy person on the inside lets them out and our heroine gets to go and see Malcolm McDowell, who was supposed to be finding a cure... when actually he's gone all kinds of batshit crazy. What is it with scientists in these situations? Do they go "Oh, well - time to go totally insane?" whenever this kind of stuff happens? Regardless, McDowell doesn't want to help Rona Mitra because he's got a castle now and pretty much set himself up as the king... oh and being batshit crazy, he thinks that technology is evil and that it's time for Rona to fight one of his nights.

Meanwhile, Bob Hoskins manages to accidentally cover Prime Minister Julian Bashir in blood when one of the infected magically enters what should probably be the most secure location in the country and subsequently the thinly veiled Gordon Brown scumbag underling takes over, planning to let the virus kill more people to thin the ranks... which for some reason he decides to tell Mitra "Oh, yeah - I was planning on getting the cure you slogged your guts out for... then sitting on my hands to effectively seal my grip on power. Kthxbye!"

Idiotic to say the least... and Mitra hasn't exactly found a cure. She knows that the people who survived had a natural immunity but there are people with a natural immunity to AIDS. That doesn't mean to say you take a litre of blood from someone with that immunity and magically get a cure. Oh, it would definitely help but this isn't like some GCSE science project you can knock out on a weekend.

Of course, when you've got someone who's saying that they're going to let a bunch of people die after you put your life on the line to save them - it's fairly clear that common sense isn't a plentiful resource in this film... Anyway, Mitra gives Bob Hoskin's a recording of evil not-Gordon-Brown saying he's going to let a bunch of people die, kills the punk who has been busting her chops for the entire film and decides to show his head to his old gang... which apparently means she's their leader.

A few logical asides here... The Reaper virus is supposedly deadly because of it's virulence... and yet somehow there was time for them to rebuild Hadrian's Wall AND outfit it with some fancy defence mechanism? Not to mention the logistics of an effective patrol around the coast of Scotland.

Then of course, one has to ask why people are still hanging out in cities... it would be beyond Captain Obvious levels of obviousness to state that society has broken down in the hot zone... yet cities by their nature require civilisation to sustain them. Even though the population was decimated, even relatively small numbers of people need a considerable amount of food and as it has been 10 years since the quarantine

And of course, the usual silly things - like retina scanners working for someone dead/unconscious... That situation was entirely stupid anyway. We're supposed to believe that there'd be a whopping 2 guards protecting the door to what should probably be the most secure location in the country? If you're that incompetent - you pretty much deserve everything you get.

Of course, films like this aren't meant for logical analysis. It's essentially a romp. The virus serves little other function than to offer a post-apocalyptic environment for our heroine to run about and fight in. The rapidity with which her team is disposed of is hilarious, they might as well have just shot themselves in the head the second they went through the gate... The film owes a depth of gratitude to the inevitable comparisons of Escape From New York and Mad Max... but it's clearly derivative but no less enjoyable in the typical action romp manner.

The funny thing about Jumper - other than the fact Hayden Christensen has inexplicably been cast in a major film after his Manakin Skywalker car crash performance in the Star Wars prequels - is how the protagonist basically forgets his old life then stops by to his old high school sweetheart... and no one remarks upon the fact he disappeared for ages... or the fact that he managed to escape death and so on. Clearly, people just returning from the dead is a regular occurance and one doesn't hold the lack of contact in the interim

Of course, Manakin manages to survive because he's like a less cool, less interesting version of Nightcrawler... yup, he can teleport. Although, Manakin can apparently teleport to anywhere he's seen (with just a photograph) in the whole world. Naturally, having bailed out of school and such, Manakin decides it would be a super idea to rob banks using his abilities. Which makes sense. What DOESN'T make sense is Samuel L. Jackson being part of a centuries old religious order that wants to lay the smack down on the Jumpers.

The Paladins have all manner of doo-dahs to track jumpers and incapacitate them. The only problem being... it's unlikely any of them could have been portable 20 years ago and unlikely most of the could even have existed 30 years ago. Hence the notion of Samuel L. Jackson's ancestors kicking the ass of Manakin's grandfather seems... idiotic. If it's a long standing movement... there were surely some like Griffin who weren't content to stand around and be murdered and even WITH the doo-dahs, they're still at a considerable disadvantage. Sure, Paladins might have had numbers on their side but it just seems hard to imagine them doing a good job.

Regardless Samuel L. Jackson doesn't want no MOTHER FUCKING JUMPERS ON HIS PLANET. So, he tracks Manakin down because... well, Manakin is an idiot having left a trail of breadcrumbs big enough to feed the 5000. Anyway, as you might guess - Manakin isn't too bothered about that - he's sleazing on his old sweetheart (if he liked her so damned much, why did he just forget her for more than 10 years? And how the hell does everyone INSTANTLY recognise him when he wasn't even knee high last time they saw him?) and he's found a somewhat stereotypical Scottish Jumper.

It really doesn't take a genius to work out what happens. Manakin takes his girl to Rome, where he and Griffin bump into some Paladins (his girlie doesn't notice) and then he lets her go home on her own... and she gets pissed. So he explains to her - as all men have to eventually - honey, I can teleport all over the shop... and no, I'm not as cool or as interesting as Nightcrawler. He 'ports her from her house to Griffin's lair... What a schoolboy error - because guess what? Samuel Mother Fucking Jackson has a big box of plot device that allows him to go through the "jump scars" (Manakin did that earlier to follow Griffin, so you can't say that it was entirely unexpected but that merely makes a direct jump to the lair even more stupid).

As you might guess, there's a bit of a fight where Griffin goes mental and does some ass kicking while Manakin kind of douches around and looks helpless while his girlfriend from the OC gets taken by SLJ back through the wormhole. Griffin decides that with the baddest mother on the other side and most of his Paladin pals, it would be a rather super idea to lob a bomb through and let the God they're ever so fond of sort them out. Manakin likes his girlie too much and so steals the detonator for the bomb. Cue the two Jumping all over the world, fighting for the detonator.

Why? Is the only question to ask here... Sure, you can't exactly go to your local hardware store and say "yeah, I'd like a detonator please." but the guy can go anywhere in the world, stop by somewhere and pick up a whole new bomb. Naturally, Griffin being on the side of girl killing - Manakin eventually manages to trap him in an electricity pylon... Electricity is shown to inhibit the ability to jump... but only due to the fact it inhibits the ability to concentrate... or something, in any respects... the chances are the pylon would either kill Griffin or that there wouldn't be any electricity running through it. Him standing there going "Ouch!" is just idiotic.

Griffin out the way, it's time to save the girl! As you can imagine, Manakin has a GREAT plan. Jump right in there! Which isn't so much a plan as idiocy. He's a good guy though, so his plan to jump the entire apartment works just fine. He 'ports it right into a lake and naturally, saves the girl... the fate of the other Paladins is somewhat unclear but he takes Samuel L. Jackson to a cave in the Grand Canyon and tells him that "I told you I was different." Presumably Samuel L. Jackson will agree... because no one else would have been stupid enough to leave him alive.

Finally, we have the touching reunion between Manakin and his estranged mother. She didn't leave because his father was a douche - she left because she was a Paladin and didn't want to kill him. Presumably if she'd quit being in a super secret organisation, she'd lose her health care and a good pension... so, abandoning her son was the logical course of action... and of course, having announced to her that he's alive... she naturally has to kill him... ah, the bond between mother and child - truly unbreakable.

The premise of the film is interesting enough... although, in all honesty it's like a somewhat less interesting take on Heroes... that is to say, ordinary people, extraordinary abilities... except they're all the same and half of them are Hayden Christensen. It's a predictable yarn and essentially follows the ol' boy meets girl but tosses in "boy disappears for 10 years due to teleportation ability" and "loses girls to secret religious order of technological murderers". The only reason to watch is to see people bamph all over the planet. Which is ok but hardly a reason to waste your time.

One thing the Bourne franchise could do with is an epilepsy warning. The number of scenes where things occur in the blink of an eye or where the camera angle changes dozens of times in the blink of an eye are too numerous to count.

This is however, no deviation from the previous two films. As with the second film, this doesn't really deviate from the original formula... actually, if anything this more similar to the second film as the eponymous protagonist actually has a clue what is going on.

The notable thing about Bourne films is that people seem to think that they're all rather complex in their plots. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's no shocking revelations for anyone but the dullest film goer - he was part of a covert project to make a bunch of ass kicking assassins, it's merely a premise not part of the plot... the plot of these films is... MATT DAMON! Doing a lot of running around, shooting and sneaky spy stuff. All other points are of only minor importance - they aren't movies about characters or complex plots, they're about slick set pieces and big explosions.

The frenetic pace is present and we move from one city to the next to the next, sometimes with such rapidity it can be easy to miss the change. Not that it really seems to matter. It's best to describe this as a man who thinks he is a thinking man man's action film. It would like you to believe that it's clever and has depth but really, it's shallow and allows for as much facial expression from Damon as you'd get out of a block of wood. Despite the pretence - it's really a fairly unapologetic summer actioner.

In many ways, Die Hard was a defining action movie of the 1980s... While it's unlikely that Die Hard 4.0 - aka Live Free Or Die Hard - will enjoy the elevated status of the first but it certainly surpassed the predecessors.

Unlike many other films, Die Hard 4.0 doesn't attempt to be clever, or have a message or anything like that. No stupid fast cutting likely to induce fits or social commentaries or edgy for the sake of edgy.

Willis is perfect as reluctant hero, John McClane - the NYC cop with the knack for being the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time - and he's well matched with Justin Long as the stereotypical errant hacker. There is none of the forced comedy and buddy-buddy that you often get in this genre. Everything seems to flow naturally and even the "lessons" learned don't feel entirely hackneyed.

The action is just what you'd expect from a Die Hard film, over the top but not so much so that you spend the entire time marvelling at how improbable it is. The film is really too much of a romp for you to spend time worrying about such details and as with the others, doesn't spend too much setting the scene. We're very quickly thrust into the midst of action, with houses exploding and guns being fired.

This Die Hard is slightly different from its predecessors in that its somewhat more grand in scale. McClane isn't just saving his wife from terrorists or stopping a bunch of mercenaries... no, this time he's saving the world. The practical effect of this is that Die Hard 4 offers far more diverse settings than any of its predecessors - although, that has been a trend over the course of the franchise but it works well, offering some truly visceral set pieces, courtesy of the resourceful McClane.

All in all, it's a very smoothly crafted action film that works very well and has the kind of heart and special effects that other recent films WISH they could have. It's at its heart, still an old school action film but it's not afraid to try new things... It might not quite beat the original but it's still an unapologetic action thriller.

So... the Transformers movie...

With Michael Bay films, you don't generally have expectations... so much as a mounting sense of dread but then, Hollywood never let a hack director with several critical and financial washouts go without a job - or Paul W.S. Anderson would have starved to death a decade ago - so why not give him something that'll be a hit anyway, eh?

Anyone familiar with the Transformers franchise - in any of its various incarnations - should have been fearful the day they heard Bay was directing... and quite why his name was so heavily promoted is something of a mystery... perhaps it's so people couldn't complain at a later point that they had not been fully apprised of the peril they faced.

As it goes, you'd still think that the basic premise of the franchise is fairly hard to get wrong. You've got a well established cast of characters, all you need to do is put them on Earth and have them slogging it out, good vs. evil... right?

Wrong! At least for Michael Bay, it seems. No... what's more important is the emphasis on teens. Horny, horny teens. Hawny, hawny, hawny, so hawny. Not really, it's the usual - geek meets hottie. Hottie doesn't know geek exists, geek buys car that is actually a giant transforming robot from another planet, geek gets hottie and so on. Let's not forget the soldier who manages to guarantee he survives until the end of the film by talking to his wife and new born. Time was that talk like that would get a man killed.

Anyway, aside from the gritty soldier trying to go see his offspring and the geek doing his best to be Jim from American Pie - there are actually some giant transforming robots in this film... amazingly. Why? Basically, a cubular plot device - the all spark - is what the Autobots and Decpticons were fighting over and it came to Earth a while ago. Megatron came looking for it but crashed in the Artic and with no anti-freeze, was soon incapacitated. Hero geek's great grandfather found Megatron, literally chilling in a glacier and for reasons of plot, his glasses had the position of the allspark transposed onto them.

If that sounds stupid written down, you can only begin to imagine how idiotic it seems when it's put on the screen. Plus a whole subplot about the Decpticons hacking the Internet and having to get the world's most leet hacker to decode their signal... which turns to be nigh on irrelevant.

Really, it's just a horrible mishmash of mediocre teaser action and some laughable excuse for a plot... it's almost like the filler you get in Godzilla films before guys in suits duke it out in Tokyo but a lot more incoherent and cliched. Plenty of forced comedy - which seems to be further liken the Geek to Jim from American Pie - which is more likely to elicit a laugh at its idiocy... or possibly some teeth grinding frustration.

So, eventually after close to two hours of essentially action free tedium, laughable - in the wrong way - attempts at humour, the teen angst/romance and the mandatory secret government agency we get to the money shot... robot on robot action in a city. Quite why the soldiers thought taking the allspark into a populated area was a good idea is never explained but then, this film never pretends to make sense.

The action itself isn't that bad but as you'd expect from a hack director like Bay, there are shaky cameras and fast cuts that should mean this film has a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Many times, there is action which really should be a single continuous shot that either cuts to a different angle or simply goes to see how fast the geek can run. This might be to make sure the effects look more convincing... they are good but there are several moments when you get pulled out the action by the fact that Optimus Prime or Megatron looks like a big blob of CGI.

On the Transformers themselves - the Autobots are more "true" to their original designs but suffice it to say that they've all been horribly reimagined. While it might be into forms that are more practical for very complicated/expensive transformations, they look like a mess... Not nearly as much as the Decpticons though... Most of whom are pretty rubbish looking in their robot state... more an amalgamation of office stationary than deadly killing machines.

All in all, the only things going for this film are the reasonably hot girl and the last 15 minutes - complete with mandatory sequel opening and cheesy use of "more than meets the eye" - which doesn't come even close to stopping this from being a real transforming trainwreck of a movie. Oh, sure fanboys and girls won't leave their seats dry but for anyone with less than fanatical love of the franchise, this will probably be a somewhat subpar action movie/toy commercial.

Really not worth wasting money on - Spielberg and Bay did what they do best. Sucked. A lot.

Many films in recent years have had trailers that misled the viewer as to the quality of the film. Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer has set a new precedent in this regard. The trailer in fact, comprises the bulk of the pitiful action in the film.

The concept of Galactus vs. The Fantastic Four has never really been that good. Basically it involves very little action. Instead we have a lot of meaningless and shallow drama. Reed and Jessica Alba are getting married!

Which is all threatened when the Silver Surfer flies around causing giant sinkholes for no reason... oh yeah, remember how Doctor Doom died? He got better. This shows the fundamental lack of imagination that runs through this film... and instead of lots of action... we get a lot of Mr. Fantastic and some general doing the alpha male thing.

In all honesty, there wasn't any reason why this film had to include the Fantastic Four... it could have been any group of sciency people. The powers were mostly an after thought, it seemed. Beyond this staggering mediocrity though,there is a greater insult. Galactus - one of Marvel's most powerful beings - IS NOTHING BUT A CLOUD OF DEADLY SPACE GAS!

Thus making this the stupidest film ever.