While out on a job, burglar Luther Whitney (Clint Eastwood) sees a woman being murdered by her lover, who just happens to be the President of the United States. When the President’s aide and Secret Service bodyguards realize that their attempt to cover up the crime has an eyewitness-shaped hole in it, they (naturally) try to eliminate him. Predictable and implausible in roughly equal measure.

As Dreamworks’ Antz was to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, so is their Shark Tale to Finding Nemo. In the Pixar movies, the characters and stories are drawn from the animal kingdom. In Finding Nemo, for example, the plot revolves around Nemo being taken from his home on the coral reef and plopped into a dentist’s aquarium. By contrast, the Dreamworks characters are more anthropomorphic in terms of their behaviour and outlook on life. The stories and the humour flow from the incongruity of human traits mapped onto other creatures. This is emphasized even more by the use of recognizable big name actors in the lead roles, which forces the animators to act more like costume designers than graphic artists.

Shark Tale takes this approach to extremes. Oscar, played by Will Smith, is the streetwise a small fish with big dreams. He’s in hock to blowfish Sykes (Martin Scorcese), who in turn is beholden to the shark mafia (with Robert De Niro as the capo). By accident, Oscar gets a reputation as a sharkslayer, and he plays this up for all it’s worth so he can live out his bling-bling dream. But how long will it be before the lies catch up with him?

The plot is weak, the mafia sterotypes are tired (even in a fishy guise), and the animation doesn’t elevate it in any way. The visuals are lovely, but no-one goes to the movies any more just to admire the pretty computer graphics. In 1995 when Toy Story came out, yes; in 2004, no. Pixar hasn’t so much raised the bar as removed it. Beautiful CGI is now a given, and in order to distinguish themselves, animated features now have to fall back on the time-honoured technique of being good films. Unfortunately, Shark Tale isn’t.

I’ve been playing a lot of Burnout 3 recently, and this film is the game’s perfect companion. There’s a wafer-thin plot involving ex-cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) going undercover to bust gangster Carter Verone’s money-laundering operation, but that’s just padding. The real point of the film is to show fast cars driving fast. With pretty blurring effects from all the fastness.

Unfortunately, the driving sequences show little originality, and they are only rarely good enough to make up for the lack of, well, anything interesting. So for all its swagger, sultry pouting, and brash attitude, the movie ends up just being rather dull.

It’s hard to comment on such a seminal work, so I’m not going to try too hard. Instead, I’ll just stick to whether I liked it or not: mostly, I didn’t. The film’s racism bothered me. It can be argued that John Ford is peaking out against racism, but personally, I didn’t see it. The film belongs very much to its own time, the 1950s, and the world has moved on since then.

Also, its highly variable emotional tone (it swings from deep emotional anguish, to near-slapstick romantic farce, and back again) made it feel unbalanced and clumsy in comparison to modern, more tighly structured films. It certainly has some outstanding sequences, and the cinematography is undoubtedly beautiful, but overall, I think it’s now a movie to watch for its place in the history of cinema rather than for pleasure.

I’m left with the overwhelming impression that some studio executive had this great idea for a film title, and commissioned a script based on it. Enterprising screenwriter (Richard Price) has an interesting little script at the ready about a police photographer who saves the life of a mobster. Screenwriter figures that he can make a fast buck if he gives the main character the nickname “Mad Dog” (he’s an overweight, mild-mannered guy with the soul of an artist, but hey, it’s ironic!), and changes the name of the cocktail waitress to “Glory”. Ka-ching!

Goodness knows that the quality of a title is no indicator of the film it belongs to, but this one just bothers me. It’s such a good title, that the sheer indifference of the film sticks in my throat. De Niro and Murray are both flat, and Uma Thurman is plain annoying as the pitiful innocent who has fallen in with a bad crowd. There’s a subtle twist right at the end that casts the plot and Murray’s character in a new light, but it’s so underplayed that you could blink and miss it. This ought to have been so much better.

There seems to be a simple Hollywood rule that if you’re doing an action film for kids, then the heroes have to be kids, too. If you’re doing comedy, you can get away with having adult protagonists (e.g. Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Scooby-Doo 2), and if you’re doing animation you can get away with almost anything; but if it’s adventure you’re shooting for, then Thou Shalt Cast Kids. Hence the side-lining of real Thunderbirds action in favour of a pretty weak kid-brother-saves-the-day story. Yawn.

(This might have been cool if it had been handled in a post-modern, Gen-X ironic fashion, but that wouldn’t have pulled in the core audience (kids). As it stands, the studio went for box office bucks over credibility with a niche nostalgia market. Tough choice….)

Signs has some nail-bitingly tense moments, but inbetween them the film is slow-moving, dull, and annoyingly preachy. The twist at the end reveals the film’s entire premiss to be rather silly. Shyamalan clearly has some chops as a director, but he needs to stop wasting his time on vanity pieces like this.

Silly sci-fi comedy about a bunch of geeks who save the Earth from super-fast evolving aliens. Passably funny in a few places, wooden and flat everywhere else. Duchovny is not a comedic leading man.

The balance between scariness and comedy isn’t quite right here, and I think it’s down to Eddie Murphy. Is this a star (ahem?) vehicle–a showcase for his talents as a family film entertainer, or is it a vehicle for ghostly special effects and gentle, PG-style jumpy horror? The story is simple, and the plot twists are obvious, so the film really has to stand or fall on its atmospherics, and how well its build-up of tension is punctuated by jokes. Unfortunately, it falls.

A truly outstanding collection of classic set-pieces, stylish scenes, and memorable quotes, but the film as a whole is rubbish. The story is poor, the pacing is all over the place, and the acting is literally farcical. Michael Caine delivers a workmanlike cheeky chappie performance, but the rest of the cast cringe, whimper, fawn, whine, pomp and strut like they’re over-emoting on stage for an audience that doesn’t have close-ups. It’s easy to see why the film is considered a classic, but it’s equally easy to see why it’s more talked about than actually watched.