IN THE third and most terrible remake of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Nicole Kidman must pretend to be a sexless, emotionless drone with the charisma of wet laundry. Ha ha! She does it so well it's almost as if she's had practice in her private life. Ha ha! Actually it's hard to tell the difference between possessed Kidman and the version . . .
Hang on moment. Didn't we do all these jokes two years ago when Nicole stank up cinemas in The Stepford Wives? Come to think of it, I seem to remember wheeling them out when she played different classes of automaton in Birthand Bewitched. Somebody seems to have finally got through to her: leave ambient roles to the properly quick and remain among the living dead.
Sadly, despite the appropriate casting, The Invasionturns out to be something of a catastrophe. The plot remains pretty much as before. A spore from beyond the stars comes to earth and sets about turning jolly traffic wardens, cart-wheeling athletes and frolicking infants into emotionless shells, catatonic enough to endure lengthy marriages to Tom Cruise.
To be fair, the cut that has has made it into cinemas appears to be a butchered version of a marginally less terrible original. Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall, has shot some passably exciting sequences, but evidence abounds of hurried reshooting and re-editing. The arrival of the alien disease is now told through a dizzyingly rapid series of news reports and the denouement discharges itself as quickly as a sneeze.
The Invasionleans towards some weighty philosophical ideas concerning the importance of free will (and so on), but it's only discernable moral is that European directors should grab the longest of spoons before supping with Hollywood. DONALD CLARKE
