Message In A Bottle

How can I give you some inkling of the interminable tortures that lie in wait for you should you be so foolhardy as to attend Message In A Bottle, Kevin Costner's latest box-office smash?

An unapologetically saccharine high-gloss romance, presumably aimed at people who don't know the meaning of the word, this unspeakable work unites Costner with the equally soulless Robin Wright Penn, furnishes them with a script Mills & Boon would have tossed into the wastepaper basket, and plods along for what transpires to be more than two hours.

What's truly scary is that they're not even taking the piss - Message In A Bottle is handled as if it were an epic of Gone With The Wind proportions, harbouring delusions of stately melodramatic grandeur in spite of the numbingly pedestrian nature of the goings-on.

The plot goes like this: gnarled, bereaved boat-builder Costner, morbidly fixated on his dead wife, sends her heartfelt love letters (in bottles, of course) which are discovered by Chicago Tribune hack Penn, who becomes all misty-eyed at the mushy sentiments therein, and tracks our hero down before embarking on the most tortuously laboured courtship I think I've ever seen on a screen.

That's about it, really, but by Christ does it take its time happening. The couple's relationship takes several weeks to consummate, which is never an auspicious sign, and the chemistry between them seems completely non-existent.

The dialogue sucks cocks in hell: "She could brighten up a whole town," enthuses Costner at one point, sporting a miserable hangdog facial expression. Penn is virtually anonymous in a deathly dull role which no actress alive could have hoped to salvage, Paul Newman does himself no favours in the role of Costner's dad, and the Kleenex are invited out to play at every opportunity.

I had tears streaming down my face all right, but they were born of boredom. Sheryl Crow and Hootie and the Blowfish provide an unspeakably awful but entirely appropriate soundtrack, and the last I heard, director Mandoki (When a Man Loves A Woman) was still alive. I can't wait for his next one.