Knight And Day
I’ll give you the drum – it can sometimes match the labours of Hercules trying to think of anything, anything at all, to write about a movie such as this. It’s not in the least bit interesting. Adopting a zero tolerance approach to the intelligence of their clientele and driven by the insatiable needs of their stars’ egos, the producers have scoured the fathomless depths of celebrity worship to discover that there is no end to the sunken treasure of inane crapola that is the gold standard of popular culture.

Tom Cruise is a rogue CIA agent trying to keep a new fangled battery, one of limitless power, from the grasp of a Spanish arms manufacturer. Cameron Diaz is the dumb blonde whom he inveigles into his globe-trotting adventure, wooing her by killing about a dozen blokes on the plane in which they are travelling. The last time I saw Diaz, in ‘My Sister’s Keeper’, she was wonderful (I cried with her), while Cruise was hilarious in his off-the-wall portrayal of a simian Hollywood studio mogul in ‘Tropic Thunder’, so I’m not immune to their capabilities – a decent part will bring out the admirable best in them, but together here they are about as appealing as a pair of piranhas.

There is an obligatory shot of Diaz’s fanzine-perfect bod in a red bikini (as a Rubens man, it doesn’t do much for me), but no amount of plastered-on make-up can disguise the fact that, as a glamour, she has entered the mutton dressed as lamb phase of her career. Cruise, meant to be a latter day James Bond, only without Sean Connery’s elegance and laconic joie de vivre in knowing that he’s going to hell on a cocktail trolley, gets to do all the lairy stuff in the exciting (yawn) CGI dominated pursuits.

A scene with him being chased across the tiled roofs of old Salzburg is clearly intended as homage to Hitchcock’s ‘To Catch A Thief’, but mentioning the two in the same sentence is a sacrilege in itself. There are some beautiful location shots of Castile, too, but despondency arrived with the credits.

All of that expertise behind the camera, all of that skill in the sound studio and editing suite – all of that money – wasted on dross. And to whose fantasies is it pandering? I left feeling like Elaine Benice who, in frustrated disbelief, shouted at the café diners as they ate their Mars Bars with knives and forks: ‘what is wrong with you people!’ ~ John Campbell 

Predators
It had never occurred to me before how much Adrian Brody looks like the young Bill Lawry, especially in profile, in which his and the Phantom’s spectacular nose are identical. And, speaking of size, you should see the gun that poor Adrian has to lug through the jungle in this sci-fi crock – it’s enormous, but fitting, I suppose, for the alpha male of his castaway gang. Without rhyme or reason, we start with Adrian falling through the air.

Luckily (or not), his parachute opens in the nick of time for him to land safely on a planet that resembles the Amazon rainforest. He meets up with seven other people – all strangers – who have also been catapulted into the alien environment. Do you need to know their types? There’s the inscrutable Jap, the ugly Latino, the bespectacled Doc, the crim, the earnest one with tiny eyes, the black dude and … the cute Girl, herself armed to the teeth. The black dude is from Sierra Leone, so he knows a thing or two about ju-ju, and when he asks ‘what if we’re already dead?’ this reviewer’s blood ran cold. Could I have entered that twilight zone where eternity is a never ending loop of cine junk? They’re all there to be hunted, like on one of those TV reality shows, and we settle into the routine of seeing them cark it one by one until there is only Adrian and the Girl in her tight-fitting black singlet left.

They are the prey of a high tech minotaur monster who can make himself invisible but still digs traps with upturned spikes at the bottom. It’s one of these that shafts the black dude, right through the heart. His early demise is accounted for and racial stereotypes restored when a survivor from previous hunts turns out to be Laurence Fishburne. In a quiet, confessional interlude, the writers try to legitimise the exercise by having Adrian, in his hero’s husky drawl, quote Hemingway about men hunting men but, love him or loathe him, it does seem a bit rich to lay this execrable venture at Ernie’s feet. The schlock sci-fi horror movie can have two saving graces – a comic sense that tells the world that it’s not to be taken seriously and an occasional if cheap fright, but this has neither. Nor are the special effects, though not top of the range, hokey enough for the slack we allow a good B-grader. Brain dead, dead boring and not even amusingly kitsch.