REVIEWED - AFTER THE SUNSET: Pierce Brosnan recently indicated that he might be interested in doing a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair. This might perhaps have been a subtle joke, because After The Sunset, a messy caper film with a decent beginning, a poor ending and no middle, is Thomas Crown 2 in all but name, writes Donald Clarke.

Back in 1999 we left the elegant thief flying into retirement with Renee Russo by his side. The quiet, prosperous life in the Caribbean does not seem to have suited them. Brosnan, slightly more portly and a great deal more grizzled, is reduced to lifting the wallets of tourists to alleviate the boredom, while his girlfriend, now considerably shorter and more Mexican, has turned into the perennially wooden Salma Hayek.

The lovers' tainted idyll is further disturbed when bumbling FBI agent Woody Harrelson turns up to explain that a famously huge diamond will soon be arriving on board a luxury liner. Harrelson hopes to arrest Brosnan as he is stealing the rock, but, somehow or other we suspect he may have a more selfish scheme in mind.

Lest there be any confusion, we should re-iterate that After the Sunset has no connection to Thomas Crown. It is an entirely unrelated set of holiday snaps - Pierce goes fishing, Woody has cocktails on the beach, Don Cheadle wears a hat - directed by the hack from Rush Hour and Red Dragon. What we want from such a picture is a scene where a tiny grabbing device is lowered from an air-conditioning duct through red laser beams towards a jewel in a Perspex case.

Such a sequence does turn up, but not before we are forced to endure an endless central section during which the protagonists bicker furiously, hop in and out of bed - Brosnan and Harrelson even get to share chaste sheets - and work hard on their tans. At least somebody got some pleasure out of the enterprise.