Taxi Driver: Story of the Scene

'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here. Who do you think you're talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? Ok.’

Travis Bickle is practising with his guns in front of a mirror in one of the most-quoted scenes in modern cinema. The film is Taxi Driver. The actor is Robert De Niro. One of the last scenes to be shot, the dialogue is improvised by De Niro who borrowed the ‘signature line from a stand-up comic’ according to Amy Taubin in the BFI Film Classics guide for the movie.

The exact identity of this comedian, curiously, remains unrecorded. Scorsese’s follow-up film was to be King of Comedy – his exorcism of the information that John Hinckley had become obsessed with Taxi Driver prior to his assassination attempt on Ronald Regan. Scriptwriter Paul Schrader had in fact used the case of Arthur Bremer – who had tried to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace – as a template for the Travis Bickle character.

Paul Schrader, who had only seen his first film at the age of seventeen, was an ex critic turned top-dollar screenwriter. He was a protégé of Brian de Palma, for whom he had written the semi-autobiographical Taxi Driver (drawing in fact on his LA experience of a nervous breakdown). With De Palma’s blessing (and some nice percentage points) Scorsese took over the script with De Niro in the lead. Despite De Niro’s recent Godfather II Oscar win the Hollywood establishment made clear its antipathy for the film at an early stage – the budget was hard to raise at a paltry $1.3 million.

The film’s story is simple enough. It’s a mood piece, a love-hate letter to New York in the era of 1970’s urban decay and chequered cabs. De Niro plays the alienated Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (his name a homage to Malcolm McDowell’s character in If…) who drives a taxi for a living; enraged by the spectacle of Jodie Foster as an underage child prostitute, he decides to arm himself with a small arsenal of handguns and ride to her rescue. In the famous mirror scene here he is, stripped to the waist, practising his moves. The mixture of jump-cuts, reverse angles and 180-degree swish pans make it hard to differentiate the man from his mirror image.

Accorsing to Scorsese, Bickle’s fluid moves are inspired by the filching scenes in Bresson’s Pickpocket. And the reason Bickle keeps repeating the line ‘are you talkin’ to me’? If the camera had panned down you would have seen Scorsese himself lying on the floor, mere inches from the actor, wearing headphones, mouthing to De Niro ‘say it again’ out of earshot – worried that the street-noise from bustling New York was ruining the take.

Tarantino Update

The final casting pieces of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds have fallen into place.

Maggie Cheung has been cast as Madame Mimieux, the French matriarch of the Cinematheque that takes in the protagonist Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) when she is homeless and being sought by the Nazis.

Previously French icon Isabelle Huppert had been attached to the role. But she reacted badly when news leaked out that she had been 'fired' from the role because of diva-ish behaviour. In fact, she had simply not turned up to a reading because no deal had been struck and no dotted line had been signed.

Finally, Samuel L. Jackson will be the omniscient narrator.

The Wrestler [The Review]

Mickey Rourke stars as the washed-up New Jersey wrestler in this Oscar-tipped low-budget movie, due for US release on 19th December.

Rourke's performance as the washed-up eighties actor playing a washed-up eighties wrestler has gripped those cultural commentators who have already seen it. Nobody ever thought this would happen – a comeback performance from Mickey Rourke many years on from his 1980’s triumphs with Barfly, Angel Heart, 9½ Weeks and Rumblefish.

Rourke plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (and gets annoyed when people use his real name), a career wrestler who is still putting on performances way past his sell-by date and having to supplement his meagre income with work heaving crates in a warehouse. He lives in a trailer park, is estranged from his daughter and seems to have few friends, even though he’s popular with his fans and his fellow wrestlers. During one event he suffers a cardiac arrest, and briefly retires, involving a humiliating stint on a deli counter in a supermarket.

Tempted by a rematch of his most famous fight back in 1986, he unwisely agrees the fight, the massive bypass scar still healing across his chest, pumping himself full if pharmaceuticals and steroids to build up bulk.

Director Darren Aronofsky is best when he plays his New York card – fancifully in Pi, but very down-to-earth in Requiem for a Dream (2000), a film whose central performance, with Ellen Burstyn as a middle-aged woman addicted to speed-filled slimming cures, won an Oscar. Here he’s in New Jersey. This is a cold and fairly uninviting place, and the hand-held camerawork accentuates the feeling of a documentary.

The environment is wintry and decaying, but the wrestling ring, somehow, always feel warm – and its understandable why Randy feels forever drawn back to it. It’s not like it was however; he was to endure many novelty, gothic acts, which involve a great deal of superficial mutilation and bleeding. The audience, these days, doesn’t want peroxided men in spangly tights and Guns and Roses on the soundtrack. They want rivers of blood.

Randy describes himself as a ‘big broken piece of meat’ and that is the feeling that Rourke gives with every inch of his performance. Indeed, the final speech that Randy gives at the end could as well describe the troubled career of Rourke himself, who at one time retired from acting to box professionally.

There’s hardly a scene where we don’t see Randy, whether he’s trying to make friendly with his angry, estranged daughter, getting picked up by a slightly suspect female fan, or in the ring with fights. There are no Rocky style training sequences. Training sequences are, to be honest, pretty boring. Instead we get more attention payed to the unexpected femininity of these super-masculine figures – the care they take with their hair being dyed, the tanning, the obsession with the body beautiful.

This isn’t Rocky, this is rock-bottom. Both Aronofsky and Rourke have pulled of a spectacular, shining comeback here – Aronofsky from the disaster of The Fountain and Rourke from the disaster of his life. This film is highly recommended.

***** stars our of five

Rogen: I Hate Getting Thin

Seth Rogen is shedding pounds off his body weight - and he hates every minute of it.

"I've been eating better and training - and hating myself for it,' admits Rogen, who is on his slim to prepare for his Green Hornet role. 'I feel like a sell out, I feel lame, I feel like a guy I would make fun of."

Rogen also wrote the screenplay for The Green Hornet, a reinvention of the old 1930's radio show that also became a Bruce Lee vehicle in the 1960's. Perhaps he should have made his Britt Reid character a little on the chunky side...

After all he's re-writing it right now.

Read more here

Howard Voices Surprise

Terrence Howard says was surprised to learn that Don Cheadle would replace him in "Iron Man 2."

"It was the surprise of a lifetime," the actor and musician told National Public Radio yesterday. "There was no explanation, (the contract) just up and vanished."

Howard said he read news reports that money was the issue, saying the contracts he signs apparently "aren't worth the paper that they're printed on sometimes."

Cheadle assumes the role of James Rhodes, a character that becomes Iron Man's sidekick War Machine in the comics, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Watchmen footage HERE

Thor Busted, Ghosts Yet to Be

Turn Down News: Daniel Craig has turned down a chance to star in Thor as it would be 'too much of a power trip' and Seth Rogan has said he 'will turn down' starring in the new Ghostbusters film if he thinks the script isn't good enough. Rogan told Collider.com "There is a point where it.s so bad it's really easy to say no."

Quantum of Solace [The Review]

After the death of girlfriend Vesper Lynd at the conclusion of Casino Royale, James Bond hunts down the shadowy group that blackmailed Lynd to betray him. Uniquely in the canon this is a follow-on mere minutes on from the former outing, a second time round for the slightly nasty Bond inaugurated by Daniel Craig. But what does Quantum of Solace actually mean?

Beginning with a car chase in Italy, the action doesn’t let up from the beginning as Bond fends of machine-gun wielding pursuing villains in their Alfa Romeos and ends up in an M16 base in Siena. There his captive reveals the existence of a sinister, clandestine organization which M (played again by Judi Dench) instructs Bond to investigate, horrified that she has no knowledge of this group or its scale of influence. M herself nearly dies as her own bodyguard springs the captive during questioning; the trail leads to Bolivia and a man called Dominic Greene (Matthieu Amalric) who is using the developing world eco-crisis to feather his criminal nest. This is a Bond film all about – water. Not diamonds, oil or uranium. Water.

There’s a long and glorious history of Bond villains but this is the first film to give them a reality check; this villain doesn’t weep blood, or sport titanium teeth, or even stroke a cat. This villain could be a Wall Street trader, a classic corporate psychopath adept at keeping ahead of the game. The Bond girl formula remains fairly unchanged – there’s Olga Kurylenko as Camille and Gemma Arterton as the tragic Agent Fields, whose death, already spread over the internet, references the ormulu assassination in Goldfinger.

There are plenty of chases, an early one through Siena during the Palio horse-racing annual event, and a pleasingly anachronistic one where Bond pilots an old cargo plane and is pursued by a propeller-driven fighter plane. Director Mark Forster doesn’t mess around with the editing – some of it is so fast it’s actually hard to follow, with edit upon edit lasting just a few seconds.

Craig, for my money, remains the best Bond since Sean Connery, and nothing about this film is going to damage that reputation. So much of the Bond films is not in its action sequences but its depiction of the international jet set high-life, and the luxurious hotels he checks into (in one amusing sequence refusing to settle to a flea pit because it suits his cover story) certainly fit the bill for vicarious pleasure. Craig brings a meaty charm to his Bond, who by this point is fairly demented from lack of sleep, grief and a desire for vengeance.

Memorable moments include a Godfather-like meeting of villains during a huge public performance of Tosca - this sequence recalls Moore-era Bond with a touch of Hannibal Lecter about it. Humor is fairly thin on the ground, but, despite the claims of Geoffrey Mcnab on The Independent, it’s there. There's a delicate balancing act between faintly preposterous situations and a genuine feeling of imminent peril. At least, post Bourne Identity, the actual hand-to-hand fighting is better to watch, and better choreographed. Bond deals in adrenaline, not life and death. Bond is never going to die.

The truth about Bond is that its machine. It's a huge, sleek vending machine. It may be famous for its product placements - its Omega watches, its high-end cars (Fords here - not very sexy), its suits and loafers, its hotels, its gold, its holiday venues. Fanciful gadgets have been phased out, mainly because you can't sell them.

The Bond franchise also a huge product placement for Pinewood, the British studio where it always takes place, and a single self-refreshing product for Eon productions who make it. Recently I met Marc Forster on a huge corporate junket; that I was supposed to interview him without seeing the film was proof to me that it wasn't ever intended to be a film. It's pure product. It's auto-merchandising taken to a level of art.

The feeling of watching Bond, unless you happen to be a psychopath, is being co-opted into a huge piece of rolling machinery with its destination always fixed and its definition of sexy corporate, glassy and ever so slightly dead.

Quantum of Solace? I’ve read up extensively on this title, and asked Forster when I met him a few weeks ago. It’s taken from a short fiction by Ian Fleming, the original writer of Bond. It means a fleeting moment of comfort. And in this Bond, the fleeting moments of comfort he gains come, without doubt, from the kills he makes.

Stars: *** Out of Five

Verdict: Bound to be overpraised, the fate of all Bond films.

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Body of Lies [The Review]

Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe star as spy and spymaster respectively in this over-complicated, fast-moving tale of CIA operations in Jordan and the Middle East by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, American Gangster, Black Hawk Down). Rushed into production after the unexpected success of American Gangster, Scott is always hugely businesslike and methodical in the way he goes about making movies, and this one was no exception, impressing Leonardo DiCaprio with his organizational skills. But as a director he’s made as many bad movies as good ones; sometimes being organised just isn’t enough.

DiCaprio evokes echoes of his (rather better) performance in Blood Diamond, a movie he did directly before this one. He’s convincing as the on-the-ground Arabist perpetually frustrated at the way his remote bosses back in Washington don’t understand or don’t care about what’s happening on the ground. Filling these rather large and squashed loafers, looking as overweight and bloated as he’s ever been, directing Leo from afar with a hugely sophisticated electronic surveillance system, is Russell Crowe, phoning in one his laziest performances to date. There’s a hugely contrived romantic link too with Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (who has had some grief in her native country for appearing in this movie), who plays a nurse in Jordan for whom Leo falls.

Essentially the plot follows CIA spook Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) as he uncovers a safe-house in Jordan which he is convinced will lead him to the most-wanted terrorist in this particular deck of cards, Al-Saleem. The only way he can flush him out is to pose as a rival terrorist and wait for the man to get in touch. Much of the action is gritty and visceral, recalling Black Hawk Down with its myriad of helicopter shots and sense of heat, danger and dust. But acting kudos goes mostly to Mark Strong as the Jordanian chief of intelligence Hani; he proves more than a match for DiCaprio is some key scenes.

Based on David Ignatius 2007 novel, which is supposed to be very well researched, Ridley clearly aims to get as much to the on-the-ground truth of things. The DiCaprio torture scene is graphic. This is not for the feint-hearted, but it also refuses to be dumb lock ‘n load entertainment. On a big screen in a big cinema it looks and sounds fantastic (Scott’s sound design is always immaculate) but it does lose its way somewhat with too many characters and too many strands of the storyline. This is not a feelgood movie, and consequently an ambiguous choice for a Saturday night out.

Quinten Terrenttinowz Nu Fulm

A publicity note went out from UK publicists Freuds yesterday about Quentin Tarantino's new film.

Here's the thing. It's called Inglourious Basterds. Not Inglorious Bastards.

What is Tarantino up to? Suggestions below, please

Chocolate [The Review]

Just picked up for distribution in the US, and opening shortly in the UK, Chocolate is the debut performance from a young Thai athlete you may well hear a lot more from in the future – in part because she’s the first truly plausible female practitioner of the martial arts since, oh, ever. Jeeja Yanin is the ingénue who kicks, swivels, elbows and whoops her way through wave upon wave of evil Thai gangsters and then feeds herself bucket-loads of M & M’s in the quiet moments.

The film Ong-Bak, by the same director Prachya Pinkaew, was the most exciting martial arts movie in well over a decade – it had genre fans salivating precisely because much of the action was real. There were few special effects, and the individuals involved in many of the fights were often putting themselves in some danger. Muay Thai, the Thai martial arts discipline which involves a great deal of kicking, is electrifying to watch; the only surprise was that it had taken so long to get onto the big screen in a viable form. The choreographer of this film discovered Yanin when she came to audition for another movie in 2004, and she went into training for two whole years while the production team wrote Chocolate for her.

She plays Zen, the daughter of a Japanese yakuza and a Thai gangster’s moll who infuriates her psychopathic boss in Bangkok and is banished to have her baby in the countryside. Zen grows up damaged, or at least with developmental issues, and shows signs of autistic behaviour throughout the film. Her greatest showdown, rather disturbingly, is with another similarly disabled young man (clearly modelled on Jet Li’s character in the atrocious Danny the Dog). Zen has aspects of the savant; she’s a brilliant mimic who absorbs martial arts technique just by watching it on TV or by gazing across the wall of her house into the martial arts school next-door.

When her mother grows sick with cancer, Zen and her sidekick do the rounds of former gangster contacts who still owe money. Zen isn’t going to take no for an answer in an ice-plant, candy warehouse and butchery-plant; she deals with wave upon wave of thug trying to bring her down. She walks out of each situation, triumphant with the cash. She never appears to kill anyone.

All these set-pieces are very good, quite electrifying in fact, though every single one of them goes on for about ten per cent too long in running time. And in between these fights we have acres of poorly-scripted melodrama and saccharine storylines, very much part of Thai film culture, but not usually exported beyond its own shores.

This is a real treat for genre fans, but I hope Yanin gets hired by a much better director sometime soon. These athletes have such short careers and she deserves much better than Pinkaew, who should have been working on an international stage by now, but seems content to stay in Thailand sending out the same old thing.

Scorsese and De Niro together again

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are to reunite for a mafia film, according to industry bible Variety.

Paramount has brought Steve Zaillian on board to adapt "I Heard You Paint Houses," the book about the mob assassin who many believe was involved in the death of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Zaillian won an Oscar for Schindler’s List and worked with Scorsese on Gangs of New York.

The book’s title comes from the grisly mafia slang for a hired assassin who ‘decorates’ walls with blood.

Eagle Eye [The Review]

Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is a Stanford drop-out who can’t pay his rent and works by day at a copy store. Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) is a single mother fussing over her young son’s rail trip to play trumpet at a big Washington event on Capitol Hill. Out of the blue, both individuals receive phone-calls from a mysterious woman who seems able to monitor their every move, and who appears to be co-opting them, against their will, into a secret service operation of terrifying obscurity.

With a surprising No 1 box-office ascendancy on its opening weekend, Eagle Eye seems to have gripped the public imagination with its lowering sense of high-tech paranoia; perhaps Joe Public is over-impressed by the presence of Steven Spielberg as a producer. It’s true that director D.J. Caruso (paired again with his leading man from Disturbia) has an eye for the dizzying detail, and for much of this movie you forget how extraordinarily dumb the script and the premise of the script really is. It looks amazing. Over and over again, you get involved and drawn in by the pulse and sheer kinetic force of the visuals. But if I was to tell you that the main plot point revolves around the combination of a child’s trumpet and an exploding diamond, you may get some idea of just how silly this film is.

Shia LaBeouf is in almost every scene and plays it like an untrained, reluctant Jack Bauer. If anything Eagle Eye proves just how influential the TV show 24 has become over the years. The jury is still out when it comes to his leading-man status; personally I don’t think he has either the looks or the star-quality or the acting chops. Michelle Monaghan similarly plays it like a tv show and behaves for much of the time like a needy, nagging wife, in something of a throwback to helpless femmes in action movies of the 1980’s. And just who is the mysterious woman who keeps calling them on the phone, and who does she represent? Well, I won’t spoil it for you but I will give you a clue – this uncredited actress sounds a bit like Majel Barrett on Star Trek.

In a recent piece of most unwelcome news, it seems that one of the scriptwriters of this thriller, Travis Wright, is developing a sequel to Bladerunner. Let’s hope someone else, who has a firmer grip on plot development, and crafting credible and emotionally-resonant scenes, is drafted in before this bad-idea movie ever gets made.

Spider-Man's next foes?

Which villains will tussle with the webslinger in Spider-Man 4 and 5 to be shot back-to-back next year?

1) The Lizard: Ever since Dylan Baker was introduced as one-armed Dr. Curt Connors in Spider-Man 2, fans have been anticipating a return. In comics lore, Connors, experimenting with a formula to regenerate his limb, unwittingly transforms himself into a cold-blooded monster. Odds: Even

2) The Vulture: Before Marvel executives insisted Raimi shoe-horn Venom into Spider-Man 3, the director was reportedly toying with bringing Ben Kingsley, always one to puff up his regal feathers, on board as this carrion-eating careerist. Odds: 3-1

3) Man-Wolf: Remember J. Jonah Jameson's astronaut son, who Mary-Jane Watson was engaged to in Spider-Man 2? Back in the 1970s, Marvel's writers had him morph into, ahem, a space werewolf. Odds: 20-1

4) The Black Cat: With Kirsten Dunst's involvement in the sequels still uncertain, could this kitty be coming through the cat flap soon? Odds: 5-1

5) Kraven the Hunter: Trophy nut Kraven comes to New York City to hunt down the most challenging foe of all: Spiderman. Raimi has an acknowledged weak spot for 1960s vintage Kraven-era Spider-Man, but would be hard pressed to make this villain interesting. Odds: 10-1

Official website here

Marvel site is here

Spiderfan is here

More about Quantum

Here's some production notes snippets from the still under-wraps Quantum of Solace, the 22nd James Bond film and the first not to be directly based on the writings of Ian Fleming.

Bond's nemesis is the rather ordinary-looking Mathieu Almaric who relishes the fight scene with 007. "I'm very lucky because usually the villain never fights but in this film I have a great fight at the end with Daniel. Greene does not know how the fight so James Bond is surprised because it's not the classical stuff of his training. It will be the fight of two animals"

Here's Judy Dench: "Mi6 has gone rather up market. All I have to tell you is, I don;t think our government has enough money to change the real M16 into my M16"

Costume Designer Louise Frogley worked with Tom Ford for the Bond suits. "He sent someone to Italy just to track down a particular material for us. I wanted to use 'mohair tonic' for the suits. It is very difficult to find because it is a sixties fabric and I'm quite sure Sean Connery would have worn it in one of his suits'.

Locations this time round include the Baja California, Mexico, Pananama and Colon. It also used the ESO Parnal Observatory in Chile and the Bregenz Opera House in Austria. A second unit was sent to record the Palio horse-race in Siena months before the film even went into production.

Official site is here.

The new DiCaprio film

I saw the new Ridley Scott movie Body of Lies last night - check back here for a review nearer the time.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative who moves swiftly around the Middle-East dealing with terrorist cells (and inevitably falling in love with a local girl) while a fat and cynical Russell Crowe directs him from afar.

It's rammed with Scott's characteristic full-pelt visual style. DiCaprio's performance recalls his stint on Blood Diamond and Crowe yet again does a variation on The Insider.

There's a fairly horrific torture scene involving Leo and hammers towards the end; he's been on record as saying he got sick for three days afterwards.

"We did that (scene) in the middle of some medieval torture tomb. There was some kind of horrific dust in the air"

Official site is here

Body of Lies opens October 10th

Brangelina Move to Berlin

Brangelina are moving to Berlin, Germany, for three months. Brad is playing the lead in the new Tarantino film "Inglorious Bastards"

They're renting a $40,000 a week chateau on Wannsee lake in a leafy Berlin suburb, according to the German media, although the pair also recently bought a flat in the central Mitte neighbourhood.

Pitt reportedly intends to commute to the nearby film set by helicopter each day - there is a landing pad in the grounds - and to Goerlitz, near the Polish border, where director Quentin Tarantino spent the weekend scouting out sites.

Interestingly it was at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 that Heyrdich proposed the infamous 'final solution' - the liquidation of the Jews.

Brad plays the leader of Jewish-American soldiers behind enemy lines in WWII

Righteous Kill [The Review]

Perhaps, all those years ago, when the was making The Godfather, Coppola realised intuitively he should never put De Niro and Pacino in the same scene together. In Righteous Kill a very average Hollywood film director named Jon Avnet (88 Minutes) jams them into every scene he can possibly manage.

The result is disastrous; Pacino is beady-eyed, mannered, dyspeptic, a spidery clown untidy as a long line of cocaine. De Niro is lumpen and jowly, his face occasionally yawning into that terrifying grimace with the downturned mouth and the blank eyes he perfected in Goodfellas.

The story is a slight one: two near-to-retirement NYPD cops are on the trail of serial killer who is almost certainly a cop as well. From an unnamed low quality videotape of De Niro’s character apparently confessing to the crimes, which from the earlier moments is interleaved with the action and the kills, we think we know where we’re going. That the videotape is not necessarily what it seems is not a huge surprise to anyone who regularly watches this kind of thriller.

The story is slight but we watch as a vigilante tracks down and shoots a number of rapists and pimps who, in the judgment of the killer, have not answered for their crimes. These include the inevitable pedophile catholic priest, the pimp, the club-owning cocaine dealer – in fact every cliché that every film about New York crime can offer. For good measure there’s a woman cop who enjoys rough sex (Carla Gugino) and who eventually plays a pivotal role in the final scenes.

The film is very poorly put together and suffers from a bad script, but the chances are you’d watch it on a long-haul flight if pushed. It’s perhaps unfair to expect Pacino and De Niro to be at the top of their game all the time, but one thing is clear about both actors; they desperately need good direction from a good director – and they haven’t received it here.

** Two Stars out of Five

Death Race [The Review]

Aimed entirely at a demographic of teenaged boys, Death Race is a remake of the cult film Death Race 2000 from 1975 which the director Paul WS Anderson has been planning for nearly ten years. It casts Jason Statham (Transporter, Ghosts of Mars) in an entirely familiar role as a wronged hard-man at the wheel of a souped-up automobile.

Framed for his wife’s murder and sent to a kind of dystopian future-prison, his only way out is to win a deadly car race which has proved big business for the prison governor (played in high heels by Joan Allen).

It’s a shame about Paul WS Anderson and it’s a shame about Joan Allen. Joan Allen has been Oscar-nominated in her time and performed a good turn in The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy; here as the evil prison warder she plays a parody of that role, a cartoon villain capable of training a swivelled shotgun on uppity prisoners as she sits behind her prison desk as the very model of puritanical conformity.

Paul WS Anderson made one of the best sci-fi films of recent years, Event Horizon, but it failed at the box-office and this director has now been reduced to making a constant stream of movies that look like video games, the very worst of which was his terrible Aliens Vs Predator. Death Race is a video game; cars can pick up weapons activations at certain points and the race itself is held on three successive levels.

It’s all too much. When you think it can’t get any worse, try throwing in some jaw-droppingly stupid introductions of a female component (female prisoners, all pretty, all large-busted) to act as navigators for the drivers, who surely would be too distracted by all this oestrogen-rich bodaciousness to fire their guns and drive their big, big cars.

Frankly, Jason Statham is also beginning to look to old for this. When you see him training on a bar his muscles have begun to turn a bit pinched and reptilian. It’s generally not a pleasant sight. His trademark surliness is beginning to look a bit indecorous for a man approaching his early middle-aged, where his bald pate makes him look old rather than voluntarily shaven.

He really needs to make himself a cup of cocoa and calm down a bit.

* One star out of Five

Death Race is already released in the US; UK release date is Sept 26th

CIA spooks and Car Crashes

Shia LaBeouf was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving on Sunday after the Indiana Jones star crashed his car, injuring his hand and knee.

He faces DUI charges after the 3am incident in West Hollywood.

Last week Shia had been talking about his new film action thriller Eagle Eye.

He plays a man who is stalked by covert special agents. He thought it was all hooey until he hung out with some real CIA guys.

To LaBeouf’s dismay they revealed that they record telephone conversations and maintain insider information on all celebrities.

"It is reality... The scary thing is sitting down with CIA operatives, who use this stuff. They played me back phone conversations I've had. It was extremely embarrassing."