THE SHADOW

THE SHADOW (Directed by Russell Mulcahy. Starring Alec Baldwin, John Lone, Penelope Ann Miller, Tim Curry)

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Well, not Russell Mulcahy, that’s for sure. While employing his undoubted visual flair in a series of spectacular set-pieces, he singularly fails to invoke any of the sense of threat or danger that made the original radio and pulp fiction Shadow such an intriguing anti-hero. In a have-your-cake-and-eat-till-you’re-sick scenario, Mulcahy attempts to preserve the good looks of handsome star Alec Baldwin yet invoke the beaky visage of the demonic original by having Baldwin don a prosthetic nose as his disguise. Well, I guess it beats Clark Kent simply taking off his glasses to become unrecognisable, but it doesn’t have a lot else going for it. If only they had given him a moustache, glasses and a cigar as well, he could have impersonated Groucho and tried to pass the whole misguided exercise off as a comedy: “That’s a nice nose, did you pick it yourself?”

Which is being overly cruel to something which may serve a useful purpose: getting young adolescents off the streets for a couple of hours. Well, a few of them anyway. Presumably working on the basis that its target audience will never even have heard (let alone care) about the ’30s original, the film-makers have tried to place him in a kind of Indiana Jones all-action fantasy, with Alec battling and quipping his way through spectacularly designed pre-war sets, up against a Fu Manchu style villain in a race for the atom bomb plot. But the result is more Dick Tracy than Batman, and as a dark-centred comic book character the Shadow is a shadow of his most immediate predecessors, out-designed and performed by The Crow, and totally upstaged by The Mask.