CRASH AND BURN

CONTAINS NO SPOILERS WORTH MENTIONING, BRRRRM BRRRRM

A Russell Mulcahy action movie with Michael Madsen and car chases, and carrying an 18 certificate? Sounds great. Beware: Crash And Burn is monumentally lame stuff - made for home viewing with only a couple of nasty bits of violence, some discreet nudity and no swearing.

Remember Gone In 60 Seconds? Well, it's basically that film all over again, except it isn't gone in 60 seconds but hangs around like a bad smell for nearly an hour and a half. And it's fused with The Fast And The Furious, except there's precious little fury involved and everyone drives as if there are speed cameras up ahead. Deep down I think it wants to be Grand Theft Auto: The Movie, except the game's being played by someone's gran as the sedatives kick in. Our weedily uncharismatic hero Kevin shows up in LA after two years and hooks up with his old buddies in the car theft business, jacking dozens of top-grade (and not so top-grade) cars for evil Michael Madsen to export to Asia. Several wildly predictable plot points later, it all ends with various uninteresting people shooting at one another at length in the dockside warehouses.

You should usually be able to rely on Russell Mulcahy to make it look good - he started out in pop videos and made movies like Razorback, Highlander and The Shadow, and even his direct-to-video Dolph Lundgren shoot-em-ups had some visual panache about them - but this looks as if it were shot by the camera crew on Channel 5's all-night phone-in quiz broadcasts: it's flat, dull, and cheap. Well worth not renting.

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