Speed Two Is Just Too Slow

"Speed 2: Cruise Control" (PG) Nationwide

Nobody ever accused Keanu Reeves of being the brainiest star in Hollywood's firmament, but he certainly made a smart move in staying well away from this bloated sequel to the terrific action picture which boosted his reputaion and earning power a couple of years ago. At the end of a summer of cynically-hyped inferior blockbusters, many of which have under-performed at the box office, the worst has been saved for last - Speed 2 is just laughably awful.

Even more than Reeves, Sandra Bullock benefited from her performance in the original movie, and she has chosen to remain on for the duration. The script explains Reeves's absence by making vague reference to Bullock's problem with death-defying, heroic boyfriends. Her consort this time around is Jason Patric, a muscle-bound SWAT trooper whom Bullock believes is a bicycle cop at the beach. When she discovers the truth, Patric attempts to mollify her by taking her on a luxurious Caribbean cruise.

Also aboard is psychopathic computer genius Willem Defoe, out to rob and then destroy the ship. Before you can say Poseidon Adventure, or even Juggernaut, the captain is dead, bombs are exploding all over the place, and most of the crew and passengers are heading for the lifeboats. Not our hero and heroine, though, who have a little deaf girl to rescue and sundry other tasks to perform, including tracking down the dastardly Defoe and preventing the ship from crashing into a huge oil tanker.

The usual criticism levelled against sequels is that they merely imitate a proven successful formula, but this can hardly be said of Speed 2. Director-writer Jan De Bont has jettisoned everything that made the original such a thrilling piece of hokum, with the solitary, forlorn example of Ms Bullock. She is left flailing around with the sort of ditzy one-liners which worked well while hurtling down the freeway on a booby-trapped bus, but are too cutesy by far for this particular "adventure". Patric struggles manfully with his badly-written role, but can't make much of it.

It's difficult to convey the sheer dreadfulness of Speed 2, but with its confused, repetitive plot, non sequiturs and unfunny jokes, it makes the summer's other big failure, Batman And Robin, look like a fine piece of film-making. The notion of the cruise ship as a place of excitement, adventure and glamour has an irredeemably Seventies naffness about it, as Luc Besson exploited with his interplanetary Love Boat spoof in The Fifth Element. But unlike his mentor Paul Verhoeven, De Bont doesn't have the wit or storytelling skills to exploit these kitschy opportunities.

The result is that, despite its much vaunted mega-budget, the film looks as cheap and nasty as an elderly TV movie. De Bont's last offering, Twister, partly made up in special effects for what it lacked in plot or character, but the effects here are deeply unimpressive. You can see that the film-makers thought so too - the climactic smash-up clearly wasn't reckoned to be enough, so there's a tacked-on super-catastrophe at the end. Too little. Too late.

"Murder at 1600" (15s) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

Hollywood's current obsession with the institution of the American presidency continues with this moderately entertaining thriller - the 1600 of the title is the number of the building on Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue better known as the White House, and Wesley Snipes is the homicide detective brought in to investigate the murder of a young female aide in a toilet of that famous building. Snipes soon comes up against the head of the Secret Service (Daniel Benzali, in his first appearance since being so unceremoniously ejected from Murder One), who appears to be more interested in protecting senior figures in the Administration than in finding the culprit, and who assigns Secret Service agent Diane Lane to keep an eye on Snipes. Meanwhile, National Security Advisor Alan Alda is doing his own manoeuvring in the background.

There are echoes here of Clint Eastwood's recent Absolute Power, and of the 1986 thriller No Way Out, both of which dealt with murderous duplicity at the highest levels in the American administration, and to be fair, Murder At 1600 is no more unconvincing than Eastwood's film, although it lacks anything like its bravura opening sequence. Director Dwight Little's uninspiring list of previous credits includes Free Willy 2 and the Steven Seagal vehicle Marked For Death, and his direction here is no more than workmanlike. Snipes and Lane work well together, though, and for the first hour there's a real sense of tension. Unfortunately, this is dissipated as the inevitable plot mechanics of an action thriller come into play, and the threads of the conspiracy become more and more and implausible.

Helen Meany adds:

"Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love", IFC, (members and guests only) From the first plaintive throb of the sitar, Mira Nair's film is a gesture of homage to her native India. The director of Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala has taken a cultural tour into a mythical 16th-century India to examine the lives and fortunes of women in a rigidly hierarchical, courtly world.

So far, so interesting. After that something goes seriously wrong, namely the script, which manages to be both silly and didactic. Cardboard characters: the resentful servant girl, Maya (Indira Varma) and the haughty princess, Tara (Sarita Choudhury) - both rivals for the attentions of the decadent king, Raj Singh (Naveen Andrews), Tara's husband, - and the obsessive artist, Jai Kumar (Ramon Tikarum) circle around each other in a claustrophobic dance, bound by mutual jealousy and desire. While it seems to be aspiring to the emblematic simplicity of a fable, this effect is hampered by crude, late-20th century didacticism about women's circumscribed roles - whether queen or courtesan, and by a lot of confusion in its messages about women's sexual freedom: Rasa Davi (Rekha), the teacher of the erotic secrets of The Kama Sutra Of Vatsayana, spouts enigmatic aphorisms to Maya about sexual power and pleasure, while grooming her students for a life of imprisonment and subservience, as courtesans.

The complexities of the power relationships between women in a quasi-feudal society, where the ruling, married, men have scores of courtesans who are both friends and rivals, were far more subtly explored three years ago in the Tunisian film, Les Silences Du Palais. It looks as if, on this occasion, Nair's obvious fascination with the ancient literature, art and history of India, as well as its light and landscape, has eclipsed her directorial judgement. She was a lot more sure-footed with contemporary and multi-cultural themes. If she was trying to capture the spirit of contemporary Indian commercial, "Bollywood" films, the borrowing simply didn't work.

Kama Sutra looks fabulous, though: the costumes are richly coloured, displaying sleek limbs and torsos with an open, celebratory sensuality. Beautifully lit and shot by the Irish cinematogapher, Declan Quinn, and designed by Mark Friedberg, the mythical architecture of the great feudal city is an amalgam of two different periods, shown by candlelight and firelight, with flags, banners and Tantric symbols silhouetted against smouldering sunsets.

There's a lot of smouldering all round, in fact, with pouting from Maya and Tara and sultry glances from Raj Singh and Jai. Most of the dialogue is jarringly contemporary for a period film, and trite in a novelettish way; the film deteriorates into an exotic pageant of extras and elephants - reminiscent of Hollywood biblical epics - all unfolding at a leaden pace.