Hannibal Rising

Thomas Harris re-boots his mega-bucks franchise with this Origins Tale of thriller-lit's most celebrated serial killer and gourmand,Hannibal Lecter. After all, a back to basics approach worked wonders for Batman and James Bond recently so why not the good psychiatrist from Baltimore, Maryland with a penchant for cannibalism?

Whether Hannibal Rising works or not largely depends on which camp you belong to: the ones who think Lecter works best taken in small doses, a sneering, malevolent figure circling the outer fringes of the main plot(as in the first 2 installments Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs) or those who delight in his elevation from psycho-killer to death-dealing avenger( a la Hannibal). Rising firmly belongs in the second category, with Lecter continuing to occupy centre-stage, charting his childhood and adolescence in a Blitzkrieged Lithuania and Post-War Paris.

The book's slender 324 pages(in hardback) and it preceding it's screen adaptation by a mere 2 months is a telling fact that Hannibal Rising originated as a screenplay for the movie and was then fleshed out to novel-length by Harris. The results are apparent, as unlike Harris' multi-layered and complex plots for Dragon and Silence, and an intricate and knotty meshing of genres in Hannibal, Rising is a pretty straightforward revenge tale, an European Death Wish with Lecter going Charles Bronson on a group of singularly revolting Hilfswillige,or Hiwis (local Lithuanians who volunteered to help the invading Nazis) in the aftermath of World War 2.

"Nothing happened to me ,Officer Starling.I happened.You can't reduce me to a set of influences ," Lecter intones in Silence, and yet this is precisely what his progenitor sets out to do in Rising, charting the events that shaped the Most Celebrated Serial Killer in crime fiction.

Lecter-philes(and count this writer as one of them) will slurp in glee as Harris gives you the origins behind Hannibal's many quirks:

Hannibal's cultivated and exotic tastes in food(oysters,sweetbreads not to mention the odd human liver,thymus and prefrontal lobe), wine( Chateau Petrus bordeaux and Batard-Montrachet) and music(Bach's Goldberg variations) ?
He's of a lineage with European aristocracy,you see. A direct descendant of Hannibal the Grim, who defeated the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grunwald, son of a count father with a title dating back to the tenth century, with a mother, a scion of two famous Milanese houses, the Sforza on one side and the Visconti on the other,not to mention an artist uncle with an elegant Japanese wife. There are also references in Hannibal of a cousin being the artist Balthus, a filiation that's abandoned in this book.

Hannibal's prodigious artistic talents that saw him sketch from memory the Palazzo Vechio from a cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the criminally insane?
A gift from childhood that was nurtured and refined in adolescence, sitting at the back of the class,sketching dissected frogs and watercolour washes of birds with equal dexterity.

Lecter's surgical skills which saw him butcher man and deer identically in Hannibal, removing sirloin,loin and small fillets from both with neatness and economy?
A legacy from being the youngest student admitted to medical school in Paris, nights spent performing cranial dissections in its anatomy lab culminating in an internship at the Baltimore State hospital.

But there are also disappointing gaps in the Lecter psycho-pathology.The Hannibal at the end of Rising is a killer of men who richly deserved their fates, his dead sister's God-less avenging angel but Harris frustratingly refuses to provide the genesis of Hannibal The Cannibal, murderer of 9 victims(presumably inncocent) and crippler of 2 when we first see him in Dragon, killer of a further five upon his escape in Silence.

That and a pedestrian plot that refuses to transcend it's dog-eared origins( something the last installment could never be accused of) makes Hannibal Rising a less than stellar installment in the Lecter tetralogy.

Still, it's a breezy read,boosted by a propulsive pace, vicious baddies whose comeuppance will be savoured with sadistic glee and brought to life via Harris' masterly prose(Notre Dame is described as "a great spider with its flying buttress legs and many eyes of its round windows...scuttling around town in the darkness") although it's one that occasionally turns Purple when describing Hannibal's courtship of his Japanese Stepmother:

Lady Murasaki: I fold cranes for your soul,Hannibal.You are drawn to the dark.

Hannibal: Not drawn,when I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence,silence captured me.

Lady Murasaki: Out of the silence you came to me and spoke to me.I know you,Hannibal,and it is not easy knowledge.You are drawn towards the darkness, but you are also drawn to me.

Hannibal: On the bridge of dreams.

There may yet be life in this series. After all, the Lecter we meet in Red Dragon is near fifty.The young Hannibal on a train to America at the close of Rising is 20. That's a 30 year gap to be filled.
If Harris is hard at work even now on the next installment, may I suggest the rather apt title of "Cannibal Rising"?. There are still rooms to be filled in the Hannibal Lecter Mind Palace,Mr.Harris.

Hannibal

What happens when you create a fictional character who transcends the written page to enter the rarefied domain of pop culture iconism? The Thriller industry-standard benchmark for virtually every grotesque,ghoulish,malevolent and sadistic killer every aspiring thriller writer(and quite a few old hands) trot out ever so often?
If you're Thomas Harris, you eschew the temptation to bang out yet another Hannibal Lecter psycho thrill-fest and take the character in an entirely different and increasingly bizarre direction.
All criticisms against Harris' move to bring Lecter front and centre are justified. The good doctor loses much of his allure when he's allowed to roam free and his homicidal nature given a motivation(one explored in more detail in Hannibal Rising, reviewed here) and you miss the Lecter/ Clarice interplay as they only meet much, much later in this lengthy book. And the Florence section does drag on.
But credit goes to Harris for refusing to saturate an already over-populated field with yet another by-the-numbers Hunt, Chase and Confront psycho-thriller. Instead we get a dizzying cocktail of Grand Guignol, Revenge Thriller and Love Story all buttressed with Harris' intricate mastery of Criminal Investigative procedures and Forensic Science.
The much reviled ending goes over much better upon a second reading and you realise the Lecter/Starling relationship and where it was headed was foreshadowed way back in The Silence Of The Lambs.
I'll probably have a Lecter-thon of reading all 4 Hannibal books sometime in the distant future, until then there's always the anticipation that some writer is going to best Harris at the thriller game. But I won't be holding my breath.

The Prestige(Book review)

Oh God! Note to self: The next time you read a book or watch a movie, write the damn review immediately! I opened this post weeks ago when I finished the book and let it lapse. And now all I have are fragments of vague memory to guide me. But I sure as hell don't want to pick up the damn book again and I don't have the heart to delete this blog so will make a go of it to the best of my abilities.
Reading Christopher Priest' novel after watching the movie robs you of the jaw-dropping surprises the twisty narrative takes. But luckily, apart from the central characters and the twists, Nolan jettisoned much of Priests' book for the film, leaving the reader with sufficient material that's new. For instance, the movie omits the present-day plot involving the descendants' of Borden and Angier which book-end the main narrative detailing the magicians' bitter feud. Also, unlike the movie, Borden and Angier never started out as colleagues, the catalyst for their enmity not the death of Angier's wife in the film( here she's happily alive until the end) but a ruined seance ( conducted by the latter, ruined by the former). It's still a terrific tale of duelling magicians, a study of the profession in the late Victorian era and a riveting story of obsessions taken to the extreme. And like the movie, Priest' narrative sleight-of-hand rivals Nolan's cinematic one. And he does it without running timelines through a blender!

The Book of Lost Things

In John Connolly's world, the dead co-exist with the living. With unresolved issues, they create fissures in the world of the living, never letting go, hovering in their sub-concious.

It's the weight of the dead that the living carry inside themselves that make Connolly's thrillers so much more potent, his heroes somehow more haunted, seemingly straddling two worlds, belonging to both and yet, not quite fitting in either.

His 5 crime thrillers featuring Maine private eye Charlie "Bird" Parker were exemplary works, seamlessly fusing crime procedural with elements of the supernatural in prose of haunting cadence.

Like Bad Men and Nocturnes, his short story collection, The Book Of Lost Things marks a departure for Connolly from his regular series, but he brings the same dark gifts to this fantasy tale. it's 1945, the advent of World War Two and David, the young boy hero of the tale, like Parker, is haunted by his dead mother's spirit, whose voice he hears calling out to him from the shadows of the sunken garden outside his bedroom, telling him she's alive. And there are other voices. The numerous books in David's room speaks to him "in dusty, rumbling tones".

It's these books David takes refuge in, sulking over the death of his mother and his father's subsequent re-marriage, a union that produced, to his increasing dismay, an unwanted step-brother. And to top it all, he sees visions of a bent, mocking figure, The Crooked Man....

When an aeroplane crashes into the garden, David scrambles through an opening in the sunken half and enters a bizarre, fantasy world. It's a world peopled with dark characters and darker events, ruled by an ailing king, his kingdom beset by a vicious horde of hybrid wolf-men called Loups. David must battle them and other strange creatures while tarrying across a dark foreboding land to the King's castle in search of The Book Of Lost Things, his passport back to his world. And all the while the Crooked Man watches. And waits...

Like its chief antagonists, The Book Of Lost Things is a hybrid. Part fantasy quest, part Wizard Of Oz, part coming of age tale, all given a vicious edge thanks to Connolly's cheeky perversions of popular fairy tales. Snow White is a fat, slovenly shrew waited on by disgruntled, Socialist propaganda spewing dwarves, the Centaur legend is given a twisted Frankenstein-ish treatment and The crooked man is Rumpelstiltskin at his most demented.

Those thinking that the violence quotient will be toned way down given the books fairy tale antecedents and a first quarter that hints at a tale geared towards younger readers may well be in for a shock. The book turns increasingly nasty and notches up a respectable body count replete with beheadings, stabbings and disembowelings which may hurt it's marketability somewhat. It's too intense for younger readers and mature,long time Connolly fans may skip this owing to its fantasy elements while awaiting the next Parker installment.

More's the pity, as The Book Of Lost Things is a rollicking good read, re-affirming the writer as a master story teller. Connolly breaks no new ground, but his lyrical prose makes the road well travelled a journey worth taking again.

Booker Bore

Turgid, over-written, ponderous and depressing, The Inheritance Of Loss re-affirms my eroding faith in "literary" tomes that come bedecked with critical plaudits and trailing awards in its self-important wake.
It's the Umpteenth NRI take on the Indian sub-continent, that's peopled with degenerate natives who still wipe snot on curtains and take to the streets chanting slogans or take up arms to further their cause. Not that this isn't what's happening. Intead, I ask, is this the ONLY depiction we need to keep being treated to? I suppose I should outline the plot, dissect its characters and ponder its message, but honestly I can't be fucked with all that. Instead allow me to direct you to Jim Crace's no-bullshit digested review of it here. Hell, he gives you the low-down on ALL of last years Booker Nominees for those, who like me, will blissfully be giving the lot of them, a miss. Enjoy!

The Religion

If Tim Willocks' prose were a man, it would be huge, muscular, lusty and frequently caked in blood and gore. And yet, it's the perfect medium to bring to life this epic tale of The Siege Of Malta, one of the greatest mis-matched battles in medieval history, pitting 48,000 troops of the powerful Ottoman Empire against less than 7,000 warrior-priests of the Knights of Saint John who called themelves The Religion.

Anyone who's read Willocks' previous books, the prison-riot best-seller Green River Rising, and the less well received but nevertheless hugely entertaining Southern Goth thriller Blood Stained Kings knows the man doesn't do subtle. The sex is frequently explicit and the violence boosted to Grand Guignol levels.

But the irony is that, while Willocks's books, in their unexpurgated form, would be near un-filmable, his narrative arcs are firmly anchored to the tropes of modern day action adventures.

While The Religion, throughout its hefty 627 pages, details the impact of the siege, the battles, lives lost, and its toll on the tiny island on the Mediteranean in exquisite detail, it's no battle treatise for the military scholar. It's a medieval action thriller, the Siege seen through the eyes of Mattias Tannhauser, warrior, trader, war profiteer and lover.

Tannhauser is co-opted, against his rational misgivings, into the search for a Maltese Noblewoman’s illegitimate son on the besieged island and is sucked into the bloody fray in no time. The fact that said Noblewoman, the Lady Carla, is a beauty with “irises green and rimed, as if with ink, by thin black circlets” wearing a dress that “clung to her body like oil, like lust… buttressed her breasts…into exquisite hemispheres” may have been a persuading factor, along with her exotic, mysterious, Spanish companion Amparo. They are aided by Tannhauser’s blood thirsty and steadfast companion Bors, and thwarted by the fanatical Inquisitor Ludovico Ludovici, plenipotentiary to His Holiness, Pope Pius IV, secret agent of Michelle Ghisleri, Inquisitor General of All Christendom, and father to Carla’s missing offspring.

The Religion is a meaty tome, jam-packed with so much medieval information that to swallow it in one sitting is not possible, neither is it recommended. Willocks paints a broad canvas, doling out Renaissance era politics, battle strategies, love story and the nature of war coupled with larger themes of birthright, redemption, obsession and religion, all shot through Willocks’ blood-spattered prose, with generous helpings of sex and carnage.

And Oh! What carnage! Chests speared, armpits maced, limbs hacked, heads severed, privates stabbed, arteries spraying blood like fountains, swordcut to the thighs, backstroke to the guts; Willocks describes these scenes with such unabashed glee that one suspects he regrets not having been there to witness it in person.

The numerous sex scenes are a welcome respite from the frequent blood-letting as Tannhauser takes time out from battle to couple lustily with Amparo as a frustrated Carla takes refuge serving the wounded. But if Willocks’ prose is flowery during battle, it’s positively Purple in the bedroom. Sentences like “ he was afflicted by a burgeoning tumescence that nothing in Creation could forefend” and “ his yard throbbed monstrously between his legs. He felt it pant like a hell dog on a gossamer leash “call for a moratorium against Renaissance era romps in books.

Mattias, born a Saxon but trained as a janissary to the Emperor of the Ottomans, navigates both worlds with effortless ease, but realizes in the end that “all cults sought only power and the submission of peoples. The people themselves… were no more than grist to their mill.”

In the Knights use of the Lord’s prayer to rally men into battle, and the Turks’ invocation of the “surah” to exhort the Faithful to slaughter, Willocks’ message is an old one : In times of war, men conveniently cover themselves in the cloak of Religion, for to pillage, conquer and destroy in the name of God gives it credence.

But in today’s political climate, it’s frighteningly current.

Crime Spree

Like I said earlier, note to self: Review a movie AS SOON as you finish watching it damn it! Else, you're faced with what I'm facing now: Having seen all 3 of the above over a weekend or to be precise, several weekends ago, they now exist as random, out-of-sequence snapshots in my head. So, I need to tap into residual feelings and hazy memories in summing up my thoughts of them:

The Departed sees Martin Scorsese back at his gangbusting, guns blazing, profanity spewing best. And yet, it suffers in comparison to its original, HK crime flick Infernal Affairs. I racked my brains throughout viewing this flick, wondering why, in spite of a dream cast that's also perfectly cast (Leo exhibiting intense, nervous energy, Matt Damon in slippery form, Jack Nicholson in full out scenery chewing mode and an incendiary Mark Wahlberg taking over Joe Pesci as The Foulest Mouth On Screen) I was merely entertained rather than shaking with delirious sweaty palmed excitement that Scorcese has abandoned turn of the century gang warfare and biopics of eccentric billionaires to return to familiar turf. It dawned on me later why. The Departed is big, flashy and loud. But the story it seeks to tell is in effect an intimate one.

Infernal Affairs was as much about identity as it was a crime thriller. It's tale of a gangster's man who infiltrates the police department and an undercover cop who weans his way into the gangster's confidence was knuckle-biting cat and mouse stuff which also took time out to focus on its 2 protagonists' angst at maintaining their dual-facade, especially Tony Leung's tortured undercover cop,his mole assignment known only to his immediate superior and living in perennial fear that his cover will be blown. The roof of a building, which is a frequent meeting point between Leung and his superior, also functions as metaphor to his alienation from the life he wishes he had as he frequently stares across it's vacant expanse at the sprawling city below which reinforces his isolation and sense of dislocation.

In The Departed, the roof is merely a functionary device, a backdrop, a setting much like any other. Leo's meetings with Charlie Sheen and Wahlberg(his superiors) could just as easily have been conducted in a bar and his final showdown with Damon could have taken place in a vacant parking lot.

The Departed required subtle brush strokes, but Scorcese splashes paint across a canvas far too big for this taut and intimate tale. But the fact that it's done so by a Returning Master is reason enough for jubilation.

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Michael Mann doesn't so much return as continue his cynical and relentlessly brutal dissection of a dystopian world peopled with hard-edged professionals, be they cops or criminals. It's drenched in his by now patented blue hue, giving it a cold and calculating sheen, much like it's ice-cool characters. But why hobble the movie with a connection to his stylish 80s TV series? For, never was a movie more handicapped by its title. Anyone expecting this to be yet another big screen version of a once hot TV show is bound to howl in rage. The key characters bearing their small screen predecessors' names is about the only nod this movie makes to its original incarnation. Which in itself is a miss step for Mann. Why should this Vice bear any resemblance to the original when this Mann himself bears no resemblance to the creator of a glossy TV show that increasingly sacrificed substance for style.?This Mann is now an ace crafter of cool as ice crime dramas that marry style with substance in ways the show could only have dreamed of. Miami Vice the movie is a logical progression from Heat and Collateral. Its characters could be called anything instead of Crockett,Tubbs, Castillo, Gina and Trudy. It could have been titled anything instead of Miami Vice. While a passing familiarity with the original source material usually enhances the viewing pleasure of a remake, this is one instance when a complete memory wipe of Miami Vice the TV show becomes essential to fully appreciate Miami Vice the movie. It's not merely the deconstruction of a TV show, it's the evolution of Mann.

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And finally Layer Cake, the weakest and yet strangely, the most enjoyable of this trio of blood soaked crime flicks. Matthew Vaughn who produced the Guy Ritchie directed Lock,Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch (or as I prefer to collectively title them, The Brits Trying To Do Tarantino Cool) now takes on the helmer's chair for this very British, very gritty and by now very familiar crime drama that seems to come out of the other side of the Atlantic periodically. Like the previous 2 Ritchie flicks, this one features a large cast of characters propelling one central plot which rapidly spider-webs into a dozen others with attitude, humour, menace and copious amounts of swearing draped in Brit lingo and slang which in itself is a joy to hear. The multiple sub-plots are sometimes tightly linked, sometimes loosely connected, occasionally brush off tangentially with one another and rapidly fades from memory minutes after you eject the disk from your player. It's got one major bonus though: a pre-Bond Daniel Craig in top form easily convincing you why he snagged the 007 mantle.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend & Talladega Nights

Making comedies that feature at its centre, characters who are basically unpleasant require a deft hand. It requires the character(s) to be fleshed out, some explanation as to why they act the way they do, a certain amount of come-uppance meted out to help the audience empathise and supremely charismatic actors to inhabit the rule, digging deep to uncover some intriguing personality facet that notches the characters' negativity a few rungs above loathsome to intriguing. And since the genre IS comedy, whatever bad after taste left behind by the Unpleasant Lead's selfish,moronic or mean-spirited nature needs to be mitigated by hefty doses of laugh out loud moments of inspired humour and brilliant gags.

In that sense, Talladega Nights:The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby works (to an extent) and My Super Ex-Girlfriend fails remarkably.

Talladega Nights (henceforth abbreviated to TN) is a Will Ferrell comedy through and through. And like his previous collaboration with director Adam McKay,"Anchorman:The Legend Of Ron Burgundy", TN takes a tried and tested(and abused) plot-line and zaps it with moments of bizarre,surreal comedy spiced with a nasty irreverent edge that conveniently helps you forget,albeit only occassionally, of its dog-eared origins.

Take, for instance the quote that opens the movie:

"America is about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed"
Immediately after that you learn that the quote supposedly originated from...ELEANOR ROOSEVELT!!!!

Not a frame of film has been seen and it's already elicited one hearty chuckle from me!

It's that kind of perverse OUT THERE humour that keeps TN from tipping over into generic hog wash. For, going by the plot alone TN isn't worth the beer-stained napkin it was scribbled on.

Ferrell is Ricky Bobby,the name and the first scene showing his delivery in a souped up car driven by a Southern-Accent spewing Gary Cole(who's always a pleasure to watch)travelling at top speed on a country side back road effectively signalling its clear cut intention to lampoon all things red-neck.

And what better milieu to stage this in than that most hallowed of all Southern-Fried institutions:NASCAR which is where a grown up Ricky thrives in as a celebrated racer(after taking to heart one of his absentee and frequently high-on-weed dad's dictums:"if you ain't first,you're last").

Digs at Drag Racing, its pervasive corporate sponsorship that has Ricky spewing Chinese to sell Oriental crackers, Ricky's mansion with multiple SUVs parked in front, his blonde,bitchy trophy Wife, foul mouthed sons called Walker and Texas Ranger ("If we wanted 'em to be wussies, we woulda named them Dr.Quinn and Medicine Woman") and delinquent weed-smoking father so consistently take the mickey out of the Red States that it's US148mil gross at the box-office is astounding( did the very people who no doubt formed its core audience know they were being lampooned?)

As mentioned,the plot's about as disposable as day-old soiled nappies.

Since Ricky is an arrrogant,selfish and shallow person,letting his potty mouthed kids insult their maternal grandfather hogging the lime-light while refusing best friend and team mate Cal Naughton Jr.(John C. McGinley) a shot at the title and who sportingly comes in second, part of a routine they call "Shake 'N' Bake" which allows Ricky to win every time, we know come-uppance that sets him on the road to humility is just around the bend.

It comes in the form of a very French and very GayJean Girrard(Played by Sacha "Ali G/Borat" Baron Cohen sporting not so much a French accent as a French Accent Americans think the French have), a rival driver hired by Ricky's team owner to put him in his place. And after a spectacular crash that puts Ricky out of action, that place is in a hospital where Ricky experiences psycho-somatic symptoms of being paralysed. If the last sentence sounds morbid, trust me when I say it's stretched to hilarious form in TN. Beginning with Ricky's imaginary "I'm on fire" reaction to his stripping to his undies(in front of a capacity crowd) and running around yelling "Help Me Jesus! Help Me Jewish God!Help Me Tom Cruise! Use your witchcraft to put out this fire!" and culminating in a hospital stay that sees him stab himself(with 2 knives) to convince his friends he's paralysed, it's Ferrell firing on all comedic cyliners.

Note I've digressed from the plot again and that's because it's simply not what keeps this movie cooking.

YOU KNOW.....Ricky's going to lose house,wife and kids on account of not being able to get behind a wheel of a car and be reduced to a penury existence delivering pizzas.

YOU KNOW..... that the dead beat dad is going to show up playing Obi-Wan to Ricky's Luke Skywalker,helping him overcome his driving fear(by among other tactics, getting him to drive with a live cougar in the passenger seat and after that, riving blindfolded ["you don't need to see to drive son. FEEL the car"]

YOU KNOW.....he overcomes his phobia to race again to reclaim what he's lost.

It's the moments of inspired humour that keep you hooked:

-A dinner table saying of Grace that teeters on the brink of sacrilege.
"Dear 8 pound 6 ounce newborn infant Jesus, hasn't even said his first word yet..."

- Ricky's wife tearfully telling the doctor she's decided to pull the plug, in spite of the fact that he's merely taking a nap

- Jean Girrard earning the wrath of patrons in a bar by playing jazz on the jukebox.
" We don't play jazz here'" retorts an irate patron
"Then why do you have it in your jukebox," enquires the Frenchman
"We keep it there for profiling purposes," dead pans the bartender.

There are many more of such inspired moments scattered throughout this flick so grab a beer , sit yo' ass down and help yourself to a heaping helping of Southern Fried Humour. TN is what Dukes Of Hazzard should have been (and missed by a long mile).


And speaking of misses..

My Super Ex-Girlfriend had all the potential to be a comedic gem. Superhero Angst, while dealt with effectively in its more dramatic incarnations (Hulk,Spider-Man) has rarely been subject matter for a comedy. Which is surprising, for it's a fertile Laugh-Pool to be mined.
Take for example, the premise of a tall,leggy,blond and beautiful super-heroine who is also by turns neurotic,jealous,needy and clingy. The paradox alone, in the hands of a capable director, is potential COMEDY GOLD. And My Super Ex-Girlfriend(henceforth referred to as MSEG) has one with outstanding, albeit dated, pedigree. Ivan Reitman, who gave us the inventive Ghostbusters flicks and 2 superior Schwarzenegger comic vehicles(Twins & Kindergarten Cop) before faltering with the 3rd one(Junior) , is a director supremely suited to the comedy genre and in Uma Thurman, you have one of the most interesting actresses(in my humble opinion) next to Rachael McAdams working today.

So,what went so bloody wrong?

After all, Uma Thurman nails her role,both as blonde superhero G-Girl and her mousy,bespectacled alter-ego Jenny Jones. She especially fleshes out,with sometimes creepy intensity, her characters' deep-seated insecurities which cause havoc and ultimately destroys her relationship with Architect Matt Saunders(Luke"Brother of Owen" Wilson).

Firstly, insecurity in a realtionship is no laughing matter and to transform it into one, one of 2 things need to be accomplished effectively.
Firstly, a credible enough reason needs be there to convince you why a girl who looks like she could qualify for next weeks' Vogue spread, who can fly to and suck the fire out of a burning building all in the time it takes for her date to be convinced she just stepped into the ladies, is so wracked with doubt and uncertainty.

Secondly, the object of her affections and later,her scorned wrath needs to be sympathetic and genuinely likeable.

Neither happens.

G-Girl's self doubt is never adequately explained and it doesn't help that her origin back-story doesn't occur until well after the movies' half-way point and does nothing to shed light on the matter(she's a nerd, touches a crashed meteor, turns blonde,gorgeous and super-powered and is nerd no more.So..is it Delayed or Dormant Insecurity we're dealing with here?)

Wilson's character is an insipid jerk, nursing a crush for a colleague who is attached, latches onto our heroine , then dumps her on the advice of a horny friend and quickly hops into the sack with the colleague once she's (conveniently) un-attached.And in a destestable move later,he even collaborates with the villain to strip G-Girl of her powers! Oh the cad! As a result, we don't quite feel the empathy we should even when she almost fries his pet-goldfish with heat-vision, puts his car on a geo-synchronous orbit into space,crashes through his ceiling twice, ruins his presentation while stripping him naked in the process and tosses a live shark into his living room. (It's Hell Hath No Fury..type Bitchy and Vindictive Woman Stereotype will earn it no kudos among feminists either)

Throw in a lame villain, a lamer love triangle( although the Other Woman is an admittedly sweet Anna Faris) and a limp rag of a climax, and this superhero take on"Fatal Attraction " unlike it's caped heroine,never takes off.