Entrapment

Easy on the eye, but downright insulting to the brain, this competently glossy but hopelessly predictable sub-Bond thriller will probably be best remembered (if at all) for the hilarious will-they-won't-they pairing of Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones (age difference: thirty-nine years).

A heist movie set in the Far East on the edge of the millennium, with its two leads playing a pair of international art thieves unwillingly thrown together by circumstance, the film lacks humour, suspense, brain or sophistication of any kind whatsoever, and ranks proudly alongside any of the decade's previous blockbusters in the sheer immensity of its woefulness.

The redoubtable Connery may indeed have aged well, but he's sixty-eight, and when Ving Rhames points out to him that "you're too old for this shit", it's impossible to disagree. In fairness to him, he doesn't appear to waste too much effort on the movie, regurgitating his Bond persona and surfing through on autopilot, with the occasional growl and grunt to remind us what a beast he is. And while the sight of Catherine Zeta-Jones wriggling all over the shop in a tight catsuit with that trademark come-hither look on her face may indeed be an aesthetically pleasing one, it merely serves to magnify the film's leaden awfulness rather than distracting from it.

Any laughs that the film yields are entirely unintentional, and the clunkiness of the dialogue is so shameless as to leave the viewer open-mouthed in disbelief. One reviewer has likened Entrapment to "a feature-length remake of the Milk Tray adverts", which is as accurate a way as any to convey its vast, timeless emptiness.

I emerged afterwards a little dazed and stunned, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. A film of such accomplished awfulness that it nearly borders on brilliance, Entrapment is recommended only to those who treasure the kind of movie they can laugh at rather than with.