Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

The good thing about Wes Anderson is his extraordinary attention to detail. As soon as he could attract decent budgets, he started going further than any other filmmaker ever in his quest to fulfill the Prime Directive of "Show, Don't Tell", to the extent that, as in this film, he'll build a set and hire an actor to stand in it gazing into the lens for the length of time it takes their character's name to be spoken during a bit of narration about somebody's past which happens to mention people who are completely irrelevant to the plot and don't otherwise appear in the film. Basically he's good at word-building.

The downside is that the people in his worlds are sometimes little more than a collection of very specific quirky tics without enough true personality for us to actually care about them. Thus he's one of those critically acclaimed directors whose films are original and in many ways dazzling inventive, and yet they don't achieve popular success because most of the audience aren't having quite as much fun as they should.

This odd story of a thoroughly disfunctional family who finally reunite under bizarre circumstances has a fascinatingly detailed crust which doesn't entirely succeed in concealing the hollow centre. Any director who seems to be concentrating on character acting, yet grossly underuses Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston at the expense of Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow, is still learning his craft! We're supposed to care about characters who would in reality have horrible or non-existent personalities just because they're kooky, and utterly inexcusable or at best deeply selfish acts or attitudes are almost instantly forgiven because the person involved suddenly learnt their lesson and/or knows how to have a good time. Seriously, encouraging young children to attend dogfights (the one thing in this movie Wes Anderson breaks his rule about showing because it would be horrible to the point of getting the film automatically banned in the UK) is not "cute" just because the characters are all laughing!

This could have a masterpiece if it had been darker. Unfortunately, having set up these people as disturbingly yet fascinatingly flawed, the much more interesting first half descends into something very close to schmaltz as the film progresses, and all ends well in an oh-so-American artificially life-affirming conclusion of the kind that wins Oscars for Best Original Screenplay (which this movie did). I think we'll see the best work from this director if (unlike Terry Gilliam) he ever fully understands that his unique visual style could equally well be applied to scripts not quite so concerned with his personal obsessions in the belief that everybody else will care about these things as much as he does.

This is not a film for everyone. Like so much sixties and seventies Italian exploitation cinema, it doesn't have the slightest notion of restraint, and it doesn't care. However, unlike the cruder horror films in this genre, this one is surprisingly light on gore (though what little there is tends to be very nasty). It's less of a horror film than a Surreal mystery with a few bits of horror here and there, not unlike "The Wicker Man", which must have been a major influence.

The actual plot - an art expert is called in to restore a hideous painting by a mad and long-dead but apparently quite famous artist in the hope of generating tourism for a rapidly decaying town, and this causes some very nasty past events all the locals want to forget to resurface - becomes almost irrelevant as our hero gets dragged further and further into a world where absolutely everything is somewhere between slightly off-kilter and horribly wrong. Just about everyone clearly knows something they won't tell him, and some of them can't even be bothered to make their lies convincing. The entire cast are at least a bit weird (there's even a random dwarf just for the added weirdness), including the increasingly obsessed hero. People who for almost the whole film aren't definitely established to be either dead or alive and therefore can't appear in person become major characters who are always lurking somewhere just out of sight, but still exert a malign influence through creepy old tape recordings, bizarre asthmatic phone-calls, and the odd murder which the police insist was an accident. And yes, there is an actual "house with laughing windows" thrown into the mix for no reason at all like some sort of Dadaist holiday home.

The movie plays out like a slow, disturbing, inescapable nightmare, and follows that twisted dream logic where everybody behaves as if their actions make perfect sense even when they make no sense whatsoever. Some of the characters are stark raving loonies so they don't need to behave rationally, but I was utterly baffled as to why many of the townspeople would go along with this insane, pointless conspiracy. Perhaps the writers left out that whole "pagan religion that secretly practices human sacrifice" thing so it wouldn't seem too much like a "Wicker Man" rip-off, forgetting that without something along those lines, most of the characters have no discernible motivation for covering up horrible, senseless murders. But if you enjoy over-the-top Italian horror movies with more style than logic, this is one of the best and oddest examples of the genre.

Once again, everybody loves a horror movie that's creepy as opposed to gory, and therefore a bit original, except me. The elephant in the room here is that the long established and weirdly puritanical horror film cliché that teenagers who have sex deserve to die has never previously been represented quite so literally. If you have sex with the wrong person, a totally unexplained ghost will hunt you down and kill you for no reason at all, except presumably that you aren't a virgin.

The concept of an utterly relentless monster that constantly heads straight for you at a slow walking pace and can look like absolutely anyone is a good one, though given that the protagonists know the rules of the game, including the fact that their lives are in imminent danger, I was puzzled that it never occurred to them to commute at regular intervals between the USA and France, permanently stranding the big bad bogeyman at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I was even more puzzled as to why an invisible creature which had moments earlier been shown to be solid enough to be revealed by having a cloth thrown over it didn't create a clearly visible person-shaped bubble when it was immersed in water, but I suppose that special effect would have been too expensive.

This film owes a vast amount to "The Ring" and its first sequel, right down to a poorly-staged showdown in a swimming-pool, but instead of Japanese people, not all of them teenagers, being randomly killed for doing something seemingly trivial for reasons that make a twisted, Surreal kind of sense, it features American teenagers dying as a punishment for being sexually active, without offering any explanation whatsoever as to why this is happening, as if we should just accept this as right. And there are some horribly mean-spirited moments where sympathetic characters suddenly do morally indefensible things so that the the scriptwriters feel justified in giving them no way out. There's more than a hint of "being less sexually repressed than an ideal Born Again Christian will cause you to die for your sins at the hands of an invisible zombie, and quite right too!" It's got one good idea, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I was rather disappointed with this. It very much wants to be a George Smiley thriller, though without Smiley, what with Alec Guinness being dead and Gary Oldman being too expensive, and it tries very hard to tick all the boxes, right down to the inevitable "which one of us is the mole?" subplot. And setting it in 1972 is a wise move, since the clunky surveillance technology of the time makes the mechanical process of spying easier for the viewer to understand, and also means that the characters can't rely on wondrous gadgets and have to do very basic things like following people or breaking into their houses, which is more dramatically satisfying.

But there is a sense of dumbing down. This is most apparent in the many scenes where MI5's police liaison officer, who isn't called Basil Exposition but might as well be, says things like: "I don't understand - please explain in simple terms what's going on". If the writers can't put across complicated ideas without using a plot device that clumsy, they aren't doing their job very well. And since this kind of story is meant to unfold with coldly logical precision like a deadly game of chess, it's inexcusable that some of the cunning plans the Russians go to great lengths to implement are nonsensical, since it implies that the writers assume the viewers aren't clever enough to follow the plot so they can get away with anything. In particular, an over-elaborate assassination plan exists purely so that the heroes have a chance to foil the villains' nefarious scheme, not because the target has to die at a specific time or place, or is even especially hard to kill.

I was also underwhelmed by Tom Hughes, a modern Smiley substitute who, in keeping with current tastes, has to be a sulky, pouting pretty boy with gorgeous cheekbones whose resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch probably isn't coincidental. Seriously, he's so pretty that more than one other character uses the word "pretty" to describe him! Unfortunately he's a nonentity. His entire personality is defined by the Very Bad Thing which happens about two minutes into episode one, plus another Very Bad Thing which is revealed so late in the story that we don't really care. And I was constantly distracted by the downright surreal fact that MI5 apparently has a grand total of six employees who for no reason at all have to do absolutely everything, often while protesting that they aren't qualified for this, plus a lot of other people who mill around looking busy in the background but literally cannot even talk because that would mean paying the actors more.

Enjoyable enough, but no classic, and with plot twists you'll probably guess well in advance, apart from the ones that come out of nowhere. Viewers who are not idiots would be well advised to skip the very end of all but the final part, since there are pointless tasters of the next episode which contain serious spoilers, presumably for the benefit of people too stupid to understand by themselves that there will be more of this serial next week.

As you might expect of a film written by, directed by and starring many of the team responsible for "Five Easy Pieces", this is an acutely observed character study of people who aren't altogether happy with their lives but don't quite know what to do about it. Jack Nicholson is surprisingly restrained as the quiet, thoughtful, introvert dominated by his larger-than-life con-man brother, played by Bruce Dern (did he ever play anyone trustworthy?) in the kind of rôle that would automatically have gone to Nicholson later in his career, though Dern's excellent as the petty crook whose dreams of greatness, as we start to realize before we've even met him, are always going to flop because his self-confidence is infinitely greater than his actual ability to pull off these grandiose schemes. Ellen Burstyn is also perfectly cast as a very brittle lady who lives in terror of the erosion of her good looks by the inevitable passage of time, and Atlantic City itself is a major character, constantly reminding us that behind its gently decaying facades, its vibrant, swinging heyday happened a long time ago, and was maybe never quite real even then. Basically, this is the story of people who missed the boat and will always miss it, but desperately need to pretend otherwise.

These are the film's strengths. Its weakness is that since its main characters are delusional losers, they have no chance whatsoever of accomplishing anything, and this becomes apparent very quickly. The only competent character makes little more than a cameo appearance, and never truly reveals his motives because there's no reason at all why he should bother to tell these irrelevant schmucks what's really going on. It's not even entirely certain that the "kingdom" Bruce Dern's character has pinned all his hopes on actually exists as a physically real place. So for most of the film, we're watching several people who are obviously doomed to be at best very disappointed indeed fool themselves in ways that wouldn't convince anyone else, while the city around them and most of its population quietly succumb to senility.

Although it's superbly observed and written, in terms of "action" there isn't very much of any kind. As for Anton Chekov's famous maxim that if you show the audience a gun in act one, you really need to fire it in act two, this film suffers from an astonishingly bad case of taking it far too literally. That very distinctive-looking pistol which crops up constantly and is handled by just about everyone might as well be equipped with a flashing red neon sign reading "when I go bang it's going to really, really matter", and there were times when I wished someone would pull the trigger so that we could move on to a bit where something happens. Overall, this a well-crafted, well-acted and extremely clever film which ultimately fails to be all that entertaining.

Some people consider this film to be Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. Personally I think it's more than slightly overrated. Ordered by the studio in no uncertain terms to reign in his trademark visual excesses after "Baron Munchausen" was a costly flop, this is a much more human-centered drama, and in many ways that's a good thing. Although it's usually spoken of as a Robin Williams film, it's really a Jeff Bridges starring vehicle. Which is no bad thing. Bridges gets a lot more screen time than Williams, which is fair enough, because he gives a far better performance in what is really his story rather than that of Williams' "Parry" (short for Parsifal, though oddly the script never mentions this).

But the elephant in the room is always Robin Williams. There's Robin Williams the not at all bad serious actor, and then there's Robin Williams the zany, kooky, wacky manchild with his trademark winsome little smile whom you can't help but love. Well, I'm sorry, but some of us didn't love that side of his public persona one bit, and actually found it rather nauseating. Terry Gilliam obviously didn't have that particular problem, and he tries to find a middle ground where those two aspects of Williams gel. And it's to Gilliam's credit that he almost succeeds. Unfortunately he's up against an ego even bigger than his own, and he can't quite manage it. He's more successful in his treatment of mental illness, since "Parry" is not afflicted with schizophrenia or some other organic mental defect, but is merely suffering from a very specific trauma that can potentially be cured in an equally specific way. No such magical cure is offered for the life-destroying mental health problems afflicting the many other very sick people in this film, who for that reason are relegated almost entirely to the background. But there are times when the character of Parry tips over from a man who behaves erratically because he's mentally ill into Robin Williams doing stand-up, and suddenly the illusion is broken.

Jeff Bridges has the less showy rôle. Partly due to the non-cooperation of Howard Stern, his "shock jock" character spends almost no screen-time doing his show-biz job, and is basically just a man with some pretty severe lifestyle and self-esteem issues to deal with. But he rarely puts a foot wrong, unlike his co-star. The most perverse aspect of this film, especially when you consider who directed it (although he made exactly the same mistake with "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas"), is that, apart from his frequent hallucinations of a Red Knight embodying his trauma in what is eventually revealed to be a truly nightmarish way, Parry's fractured dream-world isn't depicted onscreen at all (even his "Grail Castle" is a real building which just happens to exist in New York), meaning that instead of Surreal visuals showing us what it's like to be mad, we get Robin Williams telling us all about it. And that leaves way too much room for him to go into standup mode.

So ultimately it's a very good Jeff Bridges film in which Robin Williams is on a sufficiently tight leash not to ruin it, though as Terry Gilliam movies go it's oddly atypical in visual terms, andt all the real comedy comes from supposed "straight man" Bridges and the supporting cast, not the overrated Williams. A quarter of a century later, Gilliam is still trying to make a not dissimilar "Don Quixote" movie. If this is the way he treated that kind of subject-matter when he was in his prime, maybe he shouldn't bother.

This film has been getting a lot of rave reviews from horror fans. I can only assume this is another example of Blair Witch Syndrome - if it isn't a hideously gory slasher movie but tries to scare you in a different, more subtle way, it's unfamiliar so it must be good. I can only say that, having read those reviews, I was deeply disappointed.

The best acting comes from Brighton itself, but since Brighton & Hove District Council footed some of the bill, I'm not surprised their extremely picturesque town gets plenty of screen-time, even though, strictly speaking, the story could have taken place anywhere. Certain other members of the small cast, especially the younger ones, will definitely not be returning to a screen near you any time soon, except possibly under a much better director. The script is riddled with clichés, the actual horrors are almost non-existent, and the direction is pedestrian at best. As for the music, I was genuinely surprised to see in the end credits that they didn't use library tapes because they'd run out of money, but actually paid for an original soundtrack that ends up sounding like predictably lousy 1980s made-for-TV dreck.

Almost nothing is made of the potential for the older local residents to remember bad things associated with a particular place, and of course it goes without saying that in over a century, nobody, including the police, ever found the really obvious secret room in a house associated with murder, sexual perversion, and numerous missing persons. This not only sounds but looks like something made for TV, and carefully pitched so that nothing too sexual or violent occurs onscreen (the one genuinely perverse shot is quite mild, and could be edited out with no real loss).

It does seem to be trying to attain genuine levels of gothic creepiness, but everyone involved needs to try much harder if they ever get another chance. Which, since this film cost very little and was kind of a hit, and they seem to be able to competently handle most of the technical aspects of film-making (other than non-clichéd script-writing and anything to do with music), they just might. Though given the blatant nods to certain other cult horror movies they feel obliged to include - in particular,"Phantasm" and "The Shining", though you may spot a few more - and the extent to which these fall flat, maybe they won't after all.

And seriously guys, what's with that ending!? Make up your mind! Unless you honestly don't know the difference between "writing a good script" and "leaving your options open for a sequel". Which I strongly suspect that you don't.

Imagine how "Reservoir Dogs" would have played out if the protagonists had been the cast of "Slackers", and you'll get the general idea of what goes on in "Bottle Rocket". Three rather pleasant and utterly clueless young men attempt to pull off an armed robbery for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with the reality of serious crime, or indeed any other aspect of reality. It is not a spoiler to reveal that the big heist they spend most of the film working their way up to doesn't go too well, because it was never under any conceivable circumstances going to, and watching the robbery fall apart in every way you can imagine and then some is a lot of fun.

Unfortunately the journey to that point is a bit slow and meandering. The amiably feckless hero's romance with an immigrant girl who doesn't speak English aided by an increasingly embarrassed translator, the gulf between his fantasy-prone best buddy's vision of himself as a criminal mastermind and the obvious reality of the situation, and the all-round inability of any of them to do anything entirely successfully raise lots of smiles but are very seldom laugh-out-loud funny. And since this was Wes Anderson's first feature and his budget was limited, his trademark style of pausing the action to let us soak up the detail isn't as effective as it later became, since it's not the Grand Budapest Hotel in the background, just some crappy motel in Nowheresville, New Mexico.

However, he's already proficient with his other trademark directorial flourish of giving all his characters, even very minor ones, as much personality as he possibly can. James Caan deserves a special mention in this respect, although he makes barely more than a cameo appearance, as the gleefully amoral small-time crook who is nevertheless the only person in the entire film who knows what he's doing, and effortlessly conveys what an ill-advised idea it is for these naïve wasters to trust him any further than they could throw a diplodocus. Then again, this lot could probably have been outfoxed by an actual fox.

Fun in a gentle way, and very engaging if you don't mind some slow patches. Worth seeing as an early work from a director still developing his extremely distinctive style, but already showing promise of greater things.

I think this may be another of those films where a best-selling novel with a lot of wordy introspection but very few striking visual images was poorly adapted for the screen. George Clooney scowls well, and expresses self-doubt tipping over into self-loathing like a pro, but not a lot really happens.

The very first scene has a voice-over by a supporting character who has suffered a severe mental breakdown in which he hallucinated hideous and extraordinary things a director like Terry Gilliam would have had a ball with, but what we actually see, after the credits have finished rolling over urban scenery, is his voice coming out of an answering machine in an empty office. The whole film has this problem - it's the first courtroom drama I've ever seen without one single courtroom scene!

The massive court-case the hero's law firm has been fighting for six years on behalf of evil industrialists? Entirely offscreen. The evil they've done that forms the moral crux of the whole movie? Never even glimpsed. Our hero's troubled relationships with various members of his family? Almost entirely offscreen, especially the allegedly tremendously important problems he has with his alcoholic brother, who's in the movie for about a minute. His gambling addiction? Represented by one very brief scene (though we do see it twice); and so on. And then of course there's that spectacular mental breakdown, the event which kicks off the entire story, but which we don't get to see, other than a brief found-footage video clip of the least dramatic part of it that stops just when it was getting interesting. Still, the characters describe all the action we've missed to each other, so at least we know it happened.

Apart from our hero scowling at himself until he's finally pushed so far that he does the right thing, we aren't properly shown much of anything, and there's a lot of baggage which feels as though it was important in the book but the movie didn't have room to do it properly, such as the subplot in which the mentally unbalanced character comes to believe that the bizarre events in a children's fantasy novel are real, which is constantly referenced as if it'll be crucial but ends up going absolutely nowhere, or the many supposedly important characters who appear for precisely long enough to establish that they exist, and not one second longer.

Oddest of all, at the end the film suddenly changes its style and starts behaving like a thriller, even though the sequence in which this occurs generates no suspense whatsoever, owing to the fact that we know exactly what's going to happen because we already saw it 90 minutes ago! And what's the Clooney character's vitally important job supposed to be anyway? As far as I could tell, it's being the only person in a firm employing 600 lawyers who doesn't have zero common sense and even less charisma. Is that an actual job? I doubt it!

Courtroom drama with no courtroom and very little drama, in which George Clooney seldom looks at all happy, and Tilda Swinton never looks at all well. Don't bother.

This is the first attempt to bring one of Thomas Pynchon's massive, labyrinthine novels to the screen, and it has all the problems you might expect. The plot, in which a permanently stoned private eye stumbles into increasingly elaborate interlinked conspiracies while around him the Swinging Sixties curdle into the Selfish Seventies, is frequently baffling. Just about everybody in the film is either part of this vast shadowy enterprise or is coincidentally linked to it, but it's impossible to keep track of how it all fits together. Supposedly major characters barely appear in the movie, and one very important plot thread involves the murder a long time ago of somebody who isn't in the movie at all by somebody who suddenly pops up towards the end, by which time the narrator has to remind us who he is and why should we care about him. I couldn't even figure out whether the hero was meant to be a doctor who somehow gets away with being a private eye instead of making the slightest attempt to do his actual job, or a private eye whose office is in a hospital for some reason that's no doubt hilarious if you what it is because you've read the book.

It's fascinating, in a slightly infuriating way, but also oddly un-cinematic. People talk to each other at length in order to cram in as much of Pynchon's weird but superbly crafted dialogue as possible, but too often we're told about something we don't actually see. A supposedly dead but very much alive rock star talks about his career but we never see him play. A huge gang of neo-Nazi bikers are set up as adversaries and lurk menacingly in the background but do almost nothing that we ever witness. A mysterious ship is constantly referred to and glimpsed in the distance but we never see what happens on it (though somebody does tell us). And most bizarrely of all, in a film featuring constant drug use, a bad trip crucial to the plot is represented by the camera going out of focus!

Paul Thomas Anderson was presumably chosen because "Boogie Nights" is the quintessential cynical seventies movie, but maybe if they had to have a director called Anderson, they should have gone with Wes? Because this film gives us an oddly twisted vision of the early seventies, in which authority figures are one-dimensional mad fascists, women are one-dimensional sex-toys, 99% of hippies are heroin addicts, and every voice you hear is Thomas Pynchon talking through a sock-puppet with a ludicrous name. This works far better on the page than it does on the screen, especially with a hero who is nearly always stoned and tends to mumble. We need some amazing though not necessarily realistic visuals to distract us from these shortcomings, and we simply don't get them.

"The Big Lebowski" is very similar but better, with much more interesting and engaging characters. Robert Altman's weird take on "The Long Goodbye" has a lot of almost identical plot elements (including a very major one which "Inherent Vice" basically turns back to front), and gives us a more realistic but equally cynical view of the early years of the Me Decade. And I think perhaps "Inherent Vice" is halfway trying to be the third film in the "Chinatown" trilogy that never got made after "The Two Jakes" flopped. Unfortunately, in the end it's an ambitious attempt to create something extraordinary that doesn't quite come off.

I honestly don't know why everybody except me seems to love this film so much. 8 people meet for dinner, and every one of them instantly comes across as smug, shallow, self-absorbed and irritating. Which is a pity, because this is the entire cast of the movie, and every scene will feature some or all of them, frequently bickering like spoilt children.

It has been suggested that this is an intelligent sci-fi drama that makes you think about the true nature of quantum physics. It isn't. The basic premise is that a passing comet causes utterly implausible Twilight Zone things to happen because nobody involved in making this movie understood quantum physics at all, therefore it could be used to justify absolutely anything. The "science" in this film is so scrambled that they could equally plausibly have said that everything happens because the house was built on a dimensional portal constructed by an extinct race of magic elves. You might as well claim that "Guardians Of The Galaxy" is a good introduction to astrophysics!

Anyway, a bunch of stupid, unpleasant people get into an incredibly strange predicament, the nature of which slowly becomes apparent. But even once they know what's happening, they treat the whole thing as a problem to be solved in the most selfish ways they can think of, when they're not squabbling about previous relationships going back over a decade, even as some of them unsuccessfully try to point out that this is not a good time to be raking over old love affairs. Alas, the characters have no choice but to act like morons because if they don't, the cleverly ironic punch-line the scriptwriters thought up won't work.

These are the kind of "friends" who don't really like each other, or even themselves - a great deal of the plot depends on this fact - so why should we care what happens to any of them? One character, the nastiest and most annoying of the lot, says straight out that he's such a vile person that when he's had a few drinks he's capable of murder. He then starts swigging wine for no particular reason. This pretty much sums up what's wrong with the movie.

I suspect this film wouldn't exist if its makers hadn't seen an obscure 2007 sci-fi thriller called "Timecrimes". Though flawed, it deals with very similar subject-matter in a much more interesting, intelligent and genuinely nightmarish fashion. The reason not many people saw it is that it's in Spanish. Pity; it's a far better movie than this one.

This site's synopsis claims that this is an "epic action feature". Nothing could be further from the truth - I assume whoever wrote that only saw the trailer. Supposedly based on the life of a real person who taught Bruce Lee how to fight (a fact which becomes marginally relevant 3 minutes before the closing credits), the script cannot plausibly have our hero slaughtering CG hordes of thousands of flying fire-breathing warriors dressed as chrysanthemums, therefore what action there is tends to be plausible (well, almost).

In some ways this is a good thing. The fights are mostly one-on-one, and frequently civilized contests between true masters. The director referred to by this site as Kar Wai Wong, but almost everywhere else, including in this movie's credits, as Wong Kar Wai (in case you're wondering, yes, it's the same guy), really knows how to make a film look good, and this one is no exception. I've never seen another martial arts movie which so perfectly captures the inner tranquility of a kung fu master while simultaneously showing him (or her) sending opponents flying with irresistible force; you can nearly always tell who's going to win because the angry guy doing all the traditional kung fu shouting and pulling fearsome faces is inevitably about to be flattened by the quietly unruffled man who really knows what he's doing. And when I say that kung fu battles are sometimes accompanied by arias from Italian operas and this actually works, I'm not joking!

Unfortunately the movie is, to say the least, a bit light on action. Opening with a ferocious yet oddly irrelevant melee which looks suspiciously as though it may be in the film primarily to allow the creation of misleading trailers, it gradually becomes more and more sedate, focusing increasingly on the hero's domestic and economic problems, mainly caused by the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War (of which we see very little, and in which he plays no active part), and his tragic not-quite love-affair with another character. This sort of thing occupies most of the running-time, and for large stretches, quite frankly, not a lot happens. Still, it's beautifully shot.

A similar film about a fictional character who spent a bit more time actually fighting for real, and a bit less wandering around being poor and having touching reunions with old friends over cups of tea, would be the kung fu masterpiece some people claim this is. Unfortunately, the balance between action and tenderly understated emotional scenes tips way too far in the latter direction, and some of the fights we do get to see are so irrelevant that they feel as though they were inserted to bring the action quota up to the bare minimum needed to market this as a martial arts movie.

So overall, when it's good, it's very, very good. But a lot of the time, you're waiting for the next bit where something actually happens.

As with a lot of modern Spanish cinema, this film is energetic, imaginative, and not the slightest bit bothered about good taste. In many ways this is to its advantage, especially when you compare it with the safe, predictable output of the Hollywood sausage machine, where "jokes in bad taste" automatically translates into "juvenile slapstick aimed at stupid adults". Unfortunately, little-known director Damián Szifrón doesn't quite know when to stop. If bad things happen to people for absurd or horribly ironic reasons, that doesn't automatically make the situation blackly humorous, and the film sometimes wobbles uneasily as it treads a tightrope between dark comedy and plain nastiness.

Also, the format feels very odd. Although the six segments of varying lengths are all loosely about "revenge", there's absolutely no other unifying link. At the end of each story, the screen fades to black, and suddenly we're watching something completely different. The movie could be made into six short films simply by cutting it in five places, and I suspect that it was filmed in bits and pieces over a number of years due to lack of funds. In contrast, another extremely imaginative Spaniard, Luis Buñuel, plotted his episodic film "The Phantom Of Liberty" in such a way that a minor character in each chapter turns out to be the link to the next part of the story, and it feels like one seamless narrative in a way that this doesn't.

Even the "revenge" theme is a bit strained. The weakest and least suspenseful chapter is almost entirely about greed, as well as being a tirade against the horrendous levels of corruption endemic to every level of the Spanish legal system (I don't know if this is in fact true, but obviously the director of this film thinks it is, and says so very bluntly more than once in the course of it), with about ten seconds of vengeance-based subplot crammed in to justify its inclusion.

So overall, a movie brimming with gleeful, raucous energy, but just a little bit too crude for its own good, somewhat incoherent due to a gimmick that doesn't quite work, and with a tendency to shout its director's politics in your face. But Damián Szifrón is clearly somebody to keep an eye on. I'll be interested to see what he can do with a script that doesn't go all "Tales Of The Unexpected" at regular intervals, and where the entire cast isn't replaced every 15 minutes.

This is recommended as a film for all the family, but I suspect most children, especially very young ones, would be utterly baffled by it, and probably disdainful of the minimalist style of animation, which makes Wallace and Gromit look like "Avatar". The two Belgians responsible for the movie explain in the (very short) interview included as a DVD extra that they were inspired by the chaotic anything-goes collage cartoons of Python-era Terry Gilliam, but I think most people would be able to guess that anyway.

The "plot" is that Horse (who is an actual horse) is surprised on his birthday with a barbecue built by his wildly irresponsible housemates Cowboy and Indian because this was the first gift they randomly thought of. Unfortunately they accidentally ordered 50 million bricks, resulting in a chain of events which includes the destruction of their house, a bizarrely pointless mystery crime-wave, an epic and completely accidental journey taking in the centre of the Earth, the North Pole, and an underwater department store run by a pointy-headed merman, mammoths fighting giant robot penguins, and a no-holds-barred final showdown in which fish and farm animals are used as weapons. And all Horse ever wanted was to arrive on time for his music lessons because the teacher is a beautiful lady horse, therefore he feels strangely compelled to attempt to learn to play the piano.

If you can handle just over an hour (plus some ridiculously long credits to pad it out to feature length) of this kind of sometimes frantic nonsense - the town isn't called Panic for nothing! (in fact, it isn't called Panic at all, that's just the English title, but never mind) - involving animation so rudimentary that the plastic toys playing the characters often aren't even removed from their bases, this is a tremendous blast of cheap and cheerful silliness that has no profound morals or deeper meanings whatsoever, except maybe that horses will always be lousy pianists, no matter how many lessons they take. And if you think Terry Gilliam was a lot more fun in the seventies when he was just trying to raise a Surreal laugh or two, before people told him he was a genius and he believed them, you may very well love this. Just remember: "The Lego Movie" it ain't!

This film is obviously so pleased with itself that I feel a bit mean giving it only two stars. But then again, smugness is seldom endearing. And when a movie opens with a disclaimer that it in any way endorses the commercial products its two heroes are named after (by the way, the least irrelevant of the female characters is called Virginia Slim), you have to wonder if they thought things through properly before shooting began.

The hidden elephant in the room, which gets in the way of everything else as soon as you spot it, is that this film contains so many direct lifts, including bleeding chunks of dialogue, from "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid" that it's practically a remake. Let's be honest here. Mickey Rourke isn't Paul Newman, and Don Johnson (remember him?) very, very definitely isn't Robert Redford, so any hint that they're supposed to be comparable was always going to be a bad idea. Though to be fair, Mickey Rourke does do a pretty good Bruce Willis impersonation throughout, even if a lot of the time he looks as though he's having trouble keeping a straight face. He later admitted he only did it for the money - $2.75m, which was nearly a tenth of the budget, and more than a third of what this bomb ended up grossing.

As for the plot... Well, as our heroes keep smugly reminding us, they're "free spirits" (even if they're named after a brand-name and a corporate advertising logo), therefore they can do what they want all the time with no consequences, and make beautiful women into their playthings just by smiling at them. And what's more, they're such great guys that they'll stop at nothing to do "the right thing" and avenge the murder of their friends by the smirking, heavily-armed, mega-rich one-dimensional bad guys, even though the friends they're risking their lives to avenge would all still be alive if our heroes hadn't talked them into doing something incredibly stupid in the first place.

To be honest, the thing that got my attention the most, other than the constant distraction of spotting yet another quote from Butch & Sundance, was the fact that the bad guys have ridiculously long black leather coats, therefore, because "The Matrix" was still 8 years in the future when this movie was made, they look exactly like boringly generic modern good guys. Oh, there's some shooting - quite a lot, in fact - and men do what a man's gotta do, which naturally involves machine-guns and helicopters and the odd exploding car, but it's all a bit too self-congratulatory. It was a resounding flop in 1991, and 24 years later it hasn't become a cult classic, just a curious period piece which passes the time well enough, gives film buffs an exceptionally good opportunity to play "spot the pointless references to another film", and has an absurdly ill-advised title.