Strictly commercial

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2011)

OK, here's the pitch. A group of evil film makers plot to cross Blade Runner with Groundhog Day and end up creating a soulless and cynical exercise in viewer manipulation that does very well at the box office. No, wait, we've forgotten to include Minority Report. Within the first eight minutes you know with 99.999987% certainty pretty much everything that's going to happen. Which is that our soulful and anguished hero is going to get the mad bomber and the kookie girl; all that's required to make this happen is some routine investigation, some ludicrous science, some some stock characters, an ersatz moral dilemma, so-so special effects and a laughable yet nauseating feelgood ending. In other words, all the required elements of a standard studio movie. No, no, it still not quite there .. maybe we make our guy a captain in the US army who fell out with his dad and got killed in a heroic and patriotic fashion outside Kandahar .. Greenlight!
It can't be just me who longs for a sci-fi film that wasn't fathered by accountants, written by computers and tested on demographic cross sections of the Californian public wired up to electrocardiograms. Why can't the hero end up handcuffing the mad girl and kissing the kookie bomber? Or anything with the tiniest, most minuscule hint of authentic creative thought. Dream on.