For Full Story

Popcorn rating: 1.5 out of five

Gone in 60 Seconds (15)

Summer blockbuster season continues with this remake of a little-known 1974 car-smash movie.

Nicolas Cage stars as Randall 'Memphis' Raines, a man who was once the world's greatest car thief but now earns an honest buck.

Raines' younger brother Kip however, is a local hood who is working for evil British criminal mastermind Raymond 'The Carpenter' Calitri (Christopher Eccleston). When a job goes wrong, Kip gets the blame. The only way Calitri won't kill Kip is if Raines (recently returned from self-imposed exile) steals 50 classic cars in the next three days.

So Raines gathers together his old crew who have names such as Mirror Man, Sway (Angelina Jolie) and The Sphinx (ex-footballer/hardman Vinnie Jones), and they plot to steal all the cars in a single night. Meanwhile, the police are closing in on them and a rival gang is trying to kill Raines.

Director Dominic Sena has tried to make a stylish character-driven movie, but with such poorly developed characters and laughably-bad dialogue this was not the best idea. The sense that you are watching a Hollywood movie never disappears for long enough to know what the characters' names are, let alone be truly absorbed by them. This problem is compounded by Sena's odd choice of camera angles and bizarre blue and yellow lighting which permeates the entire movie.

Jones' much-heralded Hollywood debut is hilarious ,, but not in a good way. It seems he is such a bad actor the producers would only let him play a mute. When he does finally get the chance to speak, you wish he hadn't.

Jolie, however, is as compelling as ever (despite being sorely underused), and Cage somehow creates a well-rounded character in spite of the script.

This is one of the most unoriginal movies I can think of with every situation, scenario and sentence sounding very familiar. Even the long car chase near the end of the film is completely uninspired and surprisingly unthrilling.

This movie belongs on the scrapheap.