Mutant Chronicles

1 / 5 stars 1 out of 5 stars.
(Cert 18)
The Mutant Chronicles
Please don't make another ... Thomas Jane in The Mutant Chronicles

In 2002, one of the older contestants on Channel 4's Big Brother - Sandy, a department store "personal shopper" from Scotland - startled viewers by finally going into a strange emotional condition, at once catatonic and agitated with rage. Before making various attempts to escape by climbing over the wall, he announced in his torpid-resentful manner, that he had gone into a state "beyond boredom". I entered precisely that state after just five or 10 minutes of this film, a cranium-pulverisingly dull and badly acted sci-fi action non-thriller. The only brain activity it could possibly stimulate would be a pondering of the question: who actually likes this stuff? To whom will it shift DVD units in sufficient quantities to cover the production budget? Single guys who live with their parents, and who are, in John Peel's immortal description of his own fanbase, nearing the end of their eligibility for Club 18-30 holidays?

I have no idea. But the warning signs are there from the outset: there's the dreary retro-futurist production design and dull, muddy cinematography with drab, leached-out colours designed to sap your will to live. The whole look of the film is enlivened only by gouts and spouts of blood, because violence is very, very important. A booming voiceover at the start pedantically informs us that we are in 23rd century - or whenever - and that the "machines" have taken over humanity, and that the world is divided into four "corporations" who are "eternally at war": a vision that sort of muddles up Terminator and Nineteen Eighty-Four. A bizarrely first world war-style trench-warfare scene, unfolding in pitch darkness and driving rain, is interrupted because the explosions, which are many and boring, have disrupted some ancient occult seal (or something). This discharges a hideous race of mutants who have sharp bone-spears instead of hands, handy for plunging through people's heads, but presumably making tool use as tricky for them as climbing stairs was for the Daleks.

A priest played by Ron "Hellboy" Perlman assembles a Dirty Dozen-ish crew of soldiers to take them on, including Devon Aoki as a martial arts warrior who is also described as a single mother with "61 kills". The most preposterous performance, inevitably, is a cameo from John Malkovich playing the ailing president, or chief of humankind, who is dying of some ailment. He displays his trademark tic: the left side of the mouth slightly raised in a kind of grimace: part sneering patrician, part stroke victim. He has also has evidently decided (on the basis of his character's medical condition) to deliver his lines in a weird, halting voice. I suspect that no one had the nerve to tell him not to do it like that. The most disturbing thing of all this the second word of the title. Chronicles. Plural. Is there more of this in the pipeline?