Bovie Movie

Sci-fi action films don’t come any more simplistic than this offering from James Wong (writer and director of the highly entertaining Final Destination). Aware that the sole purpose of this sort of “high concept” crowd-pleaser is to provide maximum entertainment, Wong goes all out to deliver an exhilarating, nonstop adrenalin rush, unfettered by misplaced intellectual pretension. Once the preserve of Schwarzenegger and Stallone, the testosterone-charged lead role is here claimed by Hong Kong action star Jet Li. He gets to battle himself in his portrayal of two martial arts whirlwinds — one, a killer moving between parallel universes in order to murder his alter egos; the other, a Los Angeles police officer who’s the last intergalactic double and next intended victim. Wong is a celluloid magpie, mixing the style of Total Recall and Timecop with the fights and special effects of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix. While this means there’s no real innovation or surprise, it does ensure that jaw-droppingly extreme set pieces punctuate this wildly over-the-top but effective joy ride. 

Star Wars meets Ben-Hur in director Danny Cannon’s imaginatively over-the-top science-fiction rendering of the celebrated 2000 AD comic-strip hero. In the future, the world has formed into densely populated Mega Cities with the Cursed Earth being the uninhabitable region lying between them. Law and order is maintained by a fleet of elite officers who are judge, jury and executioner rolled into one, and Judge Dredd (Sylvester Stallone) is the most prolific of the brigade. This is how fans like their Stallone served up best — without subtlety, monosyllabic, biceps bulging and in constant action. Judge Dredd is easily the actor’s best role since Rocky, and Cannon blends him into the futuristic frenzy with satisfying skill. Diane Lane as Judge Hershey, the romantic judge with a conscience, has some excellent moments, and Armand Assante puts in a fine performance of manic evil as a villain with a secret. Cannon continually accents the spark and humour of the comic, while ensuring the visuals are always spectacular and epic. Frequently stunning and always exciting, Judge Dredd is an underrated fantasy gem, full of flash, plenty of bang and packing a considerable wallop. 

With this sci-fi offering, Dark Star and The Thing director John Carpenter has been reduced to repeating his own movies. Set in the year 2176, this has feisty cop Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) arrive at an isolated Martian mining town to transport notorious killer “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube) to a high-security prison. The colonists are being possessed by the spooks of the title and transformed into zombies that look as threatening as refugees from a Kiss reunion concert. These Martian living dead then swarm in a siege hugely reminiscent of Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 — itself a homage to Howard Hawks’s classic 1959 western Rio Bravo. There are moments of tension thanks to the director’s self-penned soundtrack and the rusty-red hues in which everything is bathed. But there are no real surprises here, leaving only regrets that such a talented director is responsible. 

Marshall Lawson loses his strike-team in a cold-blooded and seemingly random attack. After this he takes it upon himself to investigate the suspicious circumstances of the brutal killings. Soon he uncovers CTX Majestic, a covert military operation so secret, that now the military wants Marshall eliminated. Resolute in his pursuit, Marshall engages in a merciless battle with a drug dealer operation that appears to be secretly funded by a rogue arm of the military.

A sci-fi thriller with a tremendous sense of scale and visual splendour, The Chronicles of Riddick is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing offering. Writer/director David Twohy takes Riddick (Vin Diesel), his monosyllabic antihero from Pitch Black, and thrusts him into an imaginative, fully realised universe populated by sleek spacecraft and war-ravaged cities. Diesel grunts his way through endless fights with bounty hunters, prison guards and an army of enslaved, zombie-like warriors called the Necromongers, but Twohy forgets to provide anything resembling a compelling story. The set pieces are impressive, but without any sense of narrative this comes across as an overblown and pompous space opera. 

The animated feature-length film Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch follows the characters from the Oscar-nominated movie Lilo & Stitch. Everything seems to be going smoothly as the film begins, with Stitch acceptably assimilated into his adopted family and everyone planning for a gigantic hula festival. However, Stitch soon starts behaving as erratically as he did in the first film. Lilo (Dakota Fanning) and her older sister Nani (Tia Carrere) soon discover that there are some programming bugs in their alien friend that may make it impossible for him to stay with the new family that loves him.

Ripper 2: Letters From Within begins when Molly Keller, the last living descendant of the infamous Jack the Ripper, is sentenced to an insane asylum after some vicious murders. While there, she undergoes an experimental procedure that might cure her. Sadly, she begins to lose touch with the real world and her nefarious forefather might be able to use her to get back into the world.

Breaking up is hard to do but when your superhero girlfriend can shoot lasers from her eyes, it’s even harder. That’s the premise of this amusing high-concept comedy starring Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson. It boasts at least some of the good-natured mischief and mayhem of Ghostbusters, which put Ivan Reitman on the A-list of Hollywood directors in the 1980s. With his hangdog handsomeness and tendency for self-effacing humour, Wilson is perfect as the boyfriend who is slowly emasculated by atomic-fuelled scorn. Thurman is also convincing as G-Girl, but it’s a shame that in the second half of the movie, Don Payne’s script abandons all sympathy for her. She morphs into a gross caricature of Glenn Close’s seminal bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction and though that’s the crux of the joke, the gags do start to wear a tad thin. Ironically, it’s the weedy ex-boyfriend who carries the weight of this saga. 

Don’t Panic! This long-awaited adaptation of Douglas Adams’s classic BBC radio series/book/TV series finally makes it to the big screen without sacrificing any of its late creator’s jovially lugubrious vision. Martin Freeman stars as put-upon everyman Arthur Dent who, in the company of extraterrestrial friend Ford Prefect (rapper Mos Def), escapes the Earth moments before it’s demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Armed with Ford’s copy of the eponymous guide — a PDA travelogue voiced by Stephen Fry — Arthur tries to make sense of a universe in which aliens recite brain-mangling verse, sperm whales fall from the sky while pondering the nature of existence and a paranoid android (voiced by Alan Rickman) copes with depression. Although signs of Hollywood studio tampering are in evidence — the clumsy love story between Arthur and space girl Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) — director Garth Jennings stays true to the oddity at the heart of this quintessentially British space odyssey. 

This irresistible combination of dazzling effects and sly comedy propelled Michael J Fox to stardom and Robert Zemeckis to the front rank of Hollywood directors. And time has not robbed it of any of its vitality. Fox plays the young student who travels back in time to the 1950s and acts as matchmaker for his future parents, who are showing no sign of falling in love. It’s beautifully played by the cast (honourable mentions to Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover), and makes the most of an ingenious script from Bob Gale and Zemeckis that finds time to poke fun at 50s icons and lifestyles between the bouts of time travelling. Zemeckis’s direction is equally adroit and he never lets the effects swamp the film.