Awful

Rating: 2/10 (1 October 2006)

An utterly abysmal, uninspired effort, as aimless as it is pointless.
Set in London in the year 2027, 'Children Of Men' gives us a glimpse of a harrowing, dust-choked, infertile dystopia, where hatred and suspicion has caged immigrants and no child has been born for eighteen years. Pertinent, relevant points, all, and the writers would have done well to dwell on them, but they are never allowed to become more than background noise. Instead, we are forced to tread wearily along with the journey of our main characters, Theo (Clive Owen), Julian (Julianne Moore) as they attempt to extract a young, pregnant black girl to safety. The trouble is, within twenty minutes, I had stopped caring about their plight.
None of the characters inspires much sympathy. The young girl whom we are forced to look on as the last hope of mankind is an unpleasant individual whose every sentence is spattered with profanities in the mistaken belief that this appears gritty and shocking. Clive Owen is his usual wooden self, silent and morose most of the film apart from the moments he tries to inject some bizarre humour into an otherwise bleak film with insipid one-liners. Julianne Moore may have done better had she been given the chance  she is able to wear the required look of disillusionment and inner pain with the best of them - but is dispensed with within the first thirty minutes.
Michael Caine does add some poignancy as an ageing hippie whose wife was tortured into catatonia by MI5 and who has since withdrawn into a woodland retreat where he spends the day getting stoned and farting when someone pulls his finger.
The film drifts slowly into absurdity: a giant inflatable pig soars regally past the window at Bucks House as Theo discusses how to obtain false papers, but my favourite line was shortly after the baby girl, sole hope for mankind, is safely delivered in a dank and grotty hotel room, leaving Kee, bloody and exhausted, looking up at Theo. "Aren't you gonna cut the cord" she asks, "There's no rush!" he replies.
This is a shame, as there are some parts to this film that I liked, or rather, some parts that I could have liked had I got to know them better. But instead one becomes almost indignant that the writers have chosen to fixate so totally on a weak and ineffectual plot line rather than tackling the wider issues the film nonetheless throws up. I would quite like to know how the world got so messed up so quickly. I think there are lessons to be learned there. After all, the nightmare world that is London 2027 is not so different from our own world that it is unrecognisable, or inconceivable. Xenophobia, internment, climate change, growing infertility, the encroachment of the state into our everyday lives, these are profound and pertinent points, and they deserve more attention than this frivolous and sloppy effort grants them.