A science-fiction epic set 300 years in the future, The Mutant Chronicles is by far the silliest film I've seen at the festival thus far. Kicking off with scene-after-seen of exposition (never a good thing in an a action pic) the film takes place a near post apocalyptic earth which has been decimated by decades of war and pollution. Four giant corporations now control the planet, and their actions awaken a malevolent evil from the underworld (though how, I'm still not quite sure).

The result is that an army of mutant demons spring forth from the ground, hell-bent on wiping out what is left of man. And that's just the first 15 minutes.

The rest of the film sees a monk (Ron Perlman) and a soldier (Thomas Jane) assembling a crack team of commandoes to travel into the heart of darkness to destroy the machine that is spewing forth said mutants.

It's ridiculous stuff, and unfortunately the dialogue and visuals do little to help matters. Perlman and Jane battle valiantly with the script, but their clunky words provide more than a few instances of unintentional hilarity, and it's a wonder they kept straight faces throughout the shoot.



The computer-generated backgrounds are also a disappointment. Much like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, this monochrome vision of the future appears dull, lifeless and unegaging, and for much of the time it's so dark that you can barely make out what's going on.

That's not to say the film is a total disaster. There are some fun set pieces- an exhilarating parachute drop and a battle in a makeshift lift shaft immediately spring to mind - but they are few and far between in a film that seems criminally overlong at 100 minutes.

The result is a hotchpotch of concepts and ideas, many of which have been done better elsewhere, most notably the rabid mutant marauders of 28 Weeks Laterand the post apocalyptic 'men on a mission' of Doomsday. And what John Malkovich is doing in such tosh is anyone's guess!