Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: How this film gains a 6.7 rating is beyond belief. It deserves nothing better than a 2.0 and clearly should rank among IMDb's worst 100 films of all time. National Treasure is an affront to the national intelligence and just yet another assault made on American audiences by Hollywood. Critics told of plot holes you could drive a 16 wheeler through.

I love the justifications for this movie being good... "Nicholas Cage is cute." Come on people, no wonder people around the world think Americans are stupid. This has to be the most stupid, insulting movie I have ever seen. If you wanted to see an actually decent film this season, consider Kinsey, The Woodsman, Million Dollar Baby or Sideways. National Treasure unfortunately got a lot more publicity than those terrific films. I bet most of you reading this haven't even heard of them, since some haven't been widely released yet.

Nicholas Cage is a terrific actor - when he is in the right movies. Time after time I've seen Cage waste his terrific talent in awful mind-numbing films like Con Air, The Rock and Face-Off. When his talent is put to good use like in Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation he is an incredible actor.

Bottom line - I'd rather feed my hand to a wood chipper than be subjected to this visual atrocity again.

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: City girl Meg Tilly receives a horrifying phone call from her mother and, understandably shaken, returns home to her family's rural digs, only to be faced with a mystery: why are all the homespun residents acting out in bizarre and unsettling ways? Radiation thriller, with barely a nod to ecology, has small town residents going berserk, which (laughably) includes two women gazing at each other with desire in a public place and Tim Matheson receiving oral attention from a girl on an office bench. The picture is too silly for words, wasting Tilly's wistfulness and quiet intensity on trash while forcing itself into a corner it can't possibly hope to get out of. Some of the cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth is good (particularly a fire sequence set inside a garage), though he is let down by the scrappy editing--and a fairly bathetic finale. Simplistic screenplay has nary a surprise nor a shred of originality up its sleeve. *1/2 from ****

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: I rarely make these comments but I felt compelled to spare others the pain I endured in watching this movie. It's so stupid and implausible both in the overall story and in the details that you simply can't suspend disbelief. The problem starts early, when you see a government researcher tooling around in a new Porsche and dining with his team in a restaraunt that looks like a castle, overlooking the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. That kind of life on a government salary? Hah! It only gets worse. Toward the end, when the bad guy starts killing off the good guys, the latter group act so stupidly that you want them to die, in order to cleanse the gene pool. The special effects are pretty good - any producer's money can buy that - and the lead actors have been great in other films, but the screenplay and direction here are moronic. Many people have wondered whether there was some deliberate intelligence behind Paul Verhoeven's previous, facially stupid movies (Showgirls, Starship Troopers), but this movie should stop the wondering. He's just plain bad.

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer:
As a Dane I'm proud of the handful of good Danish movies that have been produced in recent years. It's a terrible shame, however, that this surge in quality has led the majority of Danish movie critics to lose their sense of criticism. In fact, it has become so bad that I no longer trust any reviews of Danish movies, and as a result I have stopped watching them in theaters.

I know it's wrong to hold this unfortunate development against any one movie, so let me stress that "Villa Paranoia" would be a terrible film under any circumstances. The fact that it was hyped by the critics just added fuel to my bonfire of disillusionment with Danish film. Furthermore, waiting until it came out on DVD was very little help against the unshakable feeling of having wasted time and money.

Erik Clausen is an accomplished director with a knack for social realism in Copenhagen settings. I particularly enjoyed "De Frigjorte" (1993). As an actor he is usually funny, though he generally plays the same role in all of his movies, namely that of a working-class slob who's down on his luck, partly because he's a slob but mostly because of society, and who redeems himself by doing something good for his community.

This is problem number one in "Villa Paranoia"; Clausen casts himself as a chicken farmer, which is such a break from the norm that he never succeeds in making it credible.

It is much worse, however, that the film has to make twists and turns and break all rules of how to tell a story to make the audience understand what is going on. For instance, the movie opens with a very sad attempt at visualizing the near-death experience of the main character with the use of low-budget effects and bad camera work. After that, the character tells her best friend that she suddenly felt the urge to throw herself off a bridge. This is symptomatic of the whole movie; there is little or no motivation for the actions of the characters, and Clausen resorts to the lowest form of communicating whatever motivation there is: Telling instead of showing. Thus, at one point, you have a character talking out loud to a purportedly catatonic person about the way he feels, because the script wouldn't allow him to act out his feelings; and later on, voice-over is abruptly introduced, quite possibly as an afterthought, to convey feelings that would otherwise remain unknown to the audience due to the director's ineptitude. Fortunately, at this point you're roughly an hour past caring about any of the characters, let alone the so-called story.

The acting, which has frequently been a problem in Clausen's movies, can be summed up in one sad statement: Sren Westerberg Bentsen, whose only other claim to stardom was as a contestant on Big Brother, is no worse than several of the heralded actors in the cast.

I give this a 2-out-of-10 rating.