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2 stars**

I know that I appear to be the only person on the planet who didn’t like this movie. Actually, I know another, so there’s at least two of us. I thought this was going to be a comedy but I didn’t laugh once. I did snigger once, which is probably why I scored it so high.

I also know that this film is a send up of a collection of other movies and film people, particularly the studio heads. Whichever way I tried, I couldn’t find it funny and I do so like to laugh . All the reviews I read told me it was a good to very good movie. Oh, how I wished it was. After all, I finally got around to seeing this movie months after its release. I wished I’d stayed at home and watched paint dry.

On a positive note, you can see where they spent the $120+ million budget. The special effects were excellent; worthy of any James Bond movie. It’s such a shame that they were wasted in this script.

The premise of the screenplay is excellent and probably very different from other pitches doing the rounds over the years. Essentially to take a group of actors and place them in a real life situation is ridiculous and therefore, comedic.

Tom Cruise completed a superb task in acting out the part of a mad (some will say ‘normal’) head of studio. He was so way over the top that I’m sure many studio heads will be searching to see if they were part of the character’s make up.

My main loathing with this movie was not in Robert Downey, Jr’s make up and wonderful transformation from an American to an Australian with a move back to being a African American, but with his new speech pattern, where at least half of what he said/mumbled was lost in the wilds of the script. I’ve no idea what he said half the time which is not a problem I ever have with African Americans. I know they thought they were clever, the directors/writers and actors, but it slaughtered the movie for me, which I found generally poor before this problem arose.

It looks like the movie will make some profit after DVD sales, but I won’t want to have a copy as a present. I’ll have to pass it on to a charity shop because life is finite and I don’t have those two hours to waste again.