Ghosts of Mars (USA, 2001)
Directed by John Carpenter
Starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier

The 1990s were a bad time for John Carpenter. Having returned to form with They Live, the man who was once the king of low-budget horror served up a series of disappointments, from the Near Dark rip-off Vampires to the witless Escape from L.A.. But none of these misfires incite such fury and frustration as Ghosts of Mars, one of the lousiest, stupidest and worst thought-out movies outside Michael Bay's back catalogue.For starters, Ghosts of Mars looks really, really cheap. At a budget of $28m, it was among Carpenter's more expensive efforts, and yet it looks for all the world like it was made for less than a tenth of that. The film was shot in a gypsum mine in New Mexico, with all the rocks being painted red to make it vaguely resemble a Martian settlement. Every scene bar one is shot at night, in a move designed to disguise this low-tech approach but which only serves to emphasise it. The film's aesthetic is worryingly similar to Vampirella, a little-known 1990s turkey starring Roger Daltrey as a renegade vampire who lays low on Earth by posing as a rock star.The story of Ghosts of Mars finds Carpenter shamelessly ripping off his back catalogue. The idea of prisoners and cops constantly changing sides and teaming up to fight a greater foe is taken from Assault from Precinct 13, but with all the intelligence and social commentary taken out. The idea of ancient ghosts being bent on revenge is from The Fog, and the manner in which people become possessed by these ghosts is like a cross between The Thing and Prince of Darkness.

Ghosts of Mars also rips off at least a dozen other films, borrowing their respective styles at the expense of their collected substance. Being an action movie set on Mars with horror overtones and lots of violence, there is a natural comparison with Total Recall. But whereas Paul Verhoeven was able to use flesh-ripping violence to draw an audience into the story, Carpenter borrows the full-on gore and doesn't use it for anything other than shock value.The designs of the Martian base are not original either. With the angular sandy buildings and metal doors with circles in the middle, they look exactly like Tatooine at night. It's almost as though George Lucas met Carpenter for lunch, agreed to lend him the sets and had them shipped to New Mexico. There are other Star Wars knock-offs too: the sequence of the soldiers breaking into the power station is unforgivably close to Return of the Jedi, where the rebels break into the shield generator on Endor. Add in some grimy interiors from the Alien series and possessed miners who are somewhere between Braveheart and Mad Max, and you have one desperately derivative movie.The problem is not simply that Ghosts of Mars is made of seriously well-worn parts. There are dozens of films made each year which use familiar genre tropes and make for passable if forgettable viewing. The problem with Ghosts of Mars is that it is completely stone-faced about its place in the genre. It doesn't show contempt for science fiction or action-adventure, but it takes itself deadly seriously when what it should be doing is having fun. It is to Total Recall what Xanadu was to Flash Gordon: po-faced, naff, and completely misjudged.The story of Ghosts of Mars is almost non-existent. There is the thinnest of plots involving the transport of a dangerous convict from A to B, which is complicated by the fact that evil ghosts which used to live on Mars have been released from a mine. But the film ignores or dismisses every possible chance to spice things up, trotting through the backstory of how the ghosts got there and throwing away a potentially interesting idea about Mars being run by a matriarchal society. Such nuggets are treated like the dust on the planet's surface: characters ignore it as best they can and see it as a nuisance when it gets in the way.In the absence of any real story, the plot plays out like a video game. Every five minutes there has to be a big action sequence where faceless miners get killed, beaten or blown. And because killing the miners will just unleash the ghosts to possess someone new, there is an endless supply of cannon fodder on which the protagonists can empty their magazines in ever-more pointless shootouts. We keep going round and round in circles until the train arrives, and as soon as our heroes are on the train, one of them insists on going back to try and blow them up!The stupidity of Ghosts of Mars can be seen in its numerous plot holes. If the ghosts are indeed ghosts, how come they cannot pass through walls and doors: what is it about them which make them need to possess humans? And if they need human hosts to survive, what was keeping them 'alive' before the seal on the mine was broken? Were there other creatures on Mars before humans arrived that the ghosts preyed on? What caused them to be ghosts in the first place? Why are they here?!Then there are various technical questions about Mars itself. Martian gravity appears to be the same as it is on Earth, but there is no attempt to explain this via some kind of 'gravity field generator' or other such device. The planet has only been partially terra-formed, and yet the film expects us to believe that characters can tolerate this by wearing the kind of safety specs worn by A-Level chemists. None of the weapons seem to have been customised or built specifically for Mars, and despite there being less oxygen in the air, the fireballs are every bit as big as they would be on Earth.When Carpenter made Assault on Precinct 13, he was very careful to focus on the ethics of law enforcers trusting criminals with their guns. He kept the number of times that guns changed hands to a minimum, so that the claustrophobic tension would not be compromised. Ghosts of Mars is almost a parody of film shootouts in its complete disregard for common sense. There's barely a scene involving Ice Cube where the tables aren't turned or people pull out guns they never had before. This idiocy culminates in a scene where the criminals have their weapons confiscated, only to be armed with new ones seconds later.The acting in Ghosts of Mars is universally bad. Ice Cube plays a caricature of himself, attempting to exude attitude via scenery chewing but ending up as little more than obnoxious. Natasha Henstridge, who was cast at the last minute, seems to have only one facial expression and has no chemistry with her co-stars. Because the whole film is narrated by her in flashback, we already know that she will survive: there is no tension or reason to care, and because she is the only one found on the train, all the other characters are expendable.The supporting cast fare no better. Jason Statham tries his best but is nowhere near as enjoyable as The Transporter series, or even his brief appearance in Mean Machine. Pam Grier turns up to give the film some kind of genre credibility, but before long the script deems her unnecessary and she literally loses her head. Worst of all is Joanna Cassidy, most famous for playing Zhora in Blade Runner. She spends half her time bouncing off the walls pretending to be mad and half the time staring blankly into space, wondering what happened to her career.To say Ghosts of Mars is an abject failure would be doing a disservice to abject failures. It is easily the worst film of Carpenter's career, containing none of the wit, substance, polish or ambition of his heyday. The characters are paper-thin and dull, the acting is terrible, the script is weaker than dishwater and the direction is almost non-existent. It ranks alongside Captivity as an example of a once-great director hitting rock bottom, and is nothing short of dull, dumb and deeply depressing.

Rating:
Verdict: Mind-numbingly terrible

Jaws (USA, 1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray

When interviewed for Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments, Clive Barker commented that sometimes the best ideas of how to scare people are so seemingly obvious that we overlook them without realising. In hindsight it seems absurd that no-one ever considered making a horror film about sharks before. And after Steven Spielberg set the bar with Jaws, no-one would ever come close again.Jaws is Spielberg doing what he does best: pure popcorn entertainment, with a school of memorable scenes, cracking dialogue and substance trickling through in amongst the thrills and spills. What seems on the surface to be a one-trick film drawn out over two hours gradually emerges as something which is not only scary but very well-made, with characters which are intelligently drawn and action scenes which communicate the themes rather than feeling like awkward set-pieces.Like Star Wars after it, you could be forgiven for hating Jaws given the legacy it has left behind. Apart from the three inferior sequels and dozens of derivative knock-offs, it was the film which invented both the summer blockbuster and the high-concept movie -a film which you could sum up in 25 words or less, which would be translated by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer into the aggressive money-driven ethos of modern Hollywood.Jaws has been blamed for everything from the death of New Hollywood to the infantilisation of mainstream cinema, and that's not to mention the recent criticism of conservationists about falling shark numbers. But whatever one's attitude to Spielberg in light of his subsequent career choices, it's at best guesswork and at worst sour grapes to argue that he intended any of these things to happen. Had he gone the path of his colleague George Lucas, and milked his hit for everything it had, only then would it be fair to pose such questions.With this in mind we have to re-assess Jaws as nothing more than a piece of entertainment. And on that level, it's undeniably brilliant. In adapting Peter Benchley's potboiler, Spielberg quickly dispensed of the melodramatic subplots involving extramarital affairs and power struggles on Amity Island. On this occasion, it was best to quite literally cut to the chase, with the shark becoming the centrepiece and fear being the driving force.

Spielberg once described Jaws as an aquatic version of Duel, his made-for-TV film from four year earlier about a man being chased by a truck. The comparison is very close both in Spielberg's knack for creating tension and in the characterisation of the villain. Both the truck and the shark are irrational forces of nature: they have no backstory, no character origin and no discernable motivation other than a relentless desire to kill. As a further connection, the deaths of both truck and shark are overdubbed with the sound of Godzilla dying from the 1954 original - an indication of Spielberg's affinity for B-movies and that he understands that monster movies can have a deeper significance.As with Duel, it doesn't matter that the monster in Jaws doesn't make a lot of sense. There was and is precious little to suggest that sharks prey on humans for sport; more people die every year from falling coconuts than being eaten by sharks. But the film is not so much about killer sharks as it is about characters being confronted by an unstoppable force which they never faced before and cannot hope to understand. It could almost be called the father of Hallowe'en in its contrast of peaceful, boring middle-class life with a ruthless, blood-hungry predator.This contrast is best observed in the opening section of the film. Having given us a great early jump with the death of the skinny-dipper, Spielberg withholds the shark to build up the relationships between the townsfolk. We see Roy Scheider's sleepy world slowly descend into panic and really feel his frustration when the town council and the press ignore his demands about closing the beach. As the children enter the water to swim and the attack begins, the dramatic irony kicks in and what was once a perfectly ordinary and rational community is torn apart forever.Much has been written about the production problems which Spielberg faced on Jaws which meant he could not shoot as much of the shark as he wanted. Three full-scale mechanical sharks were built for the production, and all three regularly failed due to everything from short circuits to corroding skin and getting caught in seaweed. Such failures were one of the main reasons the film went so far over-schedule and over-budget: what started as a $4m movie shooting for 55 days ended up as a $9m movie that shot for 159 days.In the end, the problems with the shark were not merely serendipitous: they helped to create one of the defining features of the film. Because he could not show the monster as he wanted, Spielberg had to improvise with different techniques which could hint at what the shark was capable of doing. It's testament to his ability as a filmmaker that he could achieve so much threat and suspense from little more than a dorsal fin and a few barrels - enhanced by his use of the former to comedic effect early in the film. Through these techniques, the shark takes on a quality of amorphous evil whose only real equal at the time was Rover from The Prisoner.

But as before, Jaws is less about the shark than the characters reacting to it, and no matter how much of the action revolves around 'Bruce', we keep coming back to the people. In its second hour, where most of the action takes places on the Orca, we genuinely bond with this foolhardy trio and soak up all the conflicts within their personalities. Brody's determination to protect his family is contrasted by Quint's obsessive streak and Hooper's feeling of being - no pun intended - a fish out of water.As with The Sting, Robert Shaw dominates every scene that he is in. His accent may be a little harder to pin down this time, but his piercing intensity and unkempt manner give him unrivalled screen presence. Although much of his early lines are played for comedy, to set him up as a loose cannon against the uptight Brody and Hooper, he gradually takes on a more intense, obsessive quality which lead you to wonder whether or not the shark has driven him mad.The best scene in Jaws comes when the three men are sitting in the boat at night and Quint begins talking about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. In a speech co-written by John Milius (who scripted Apocalypse Now), he talks about his experience with sharks in the same way that Colonel Kurtz talked about horror - as something to be somehow embraced and understood, even at the cost of one's sanity or soul. The dialogue in this section is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's work in The Old Man and the Sea, with man and nature locked in battle, both mentally and physically, while all around there is only silence.Jaws remains a high-water mark in Spielberg's career and in those of all the performers. It isn't as relentless as Hallowe'en in its ability to sustain fear, and Spielberg's work on the Indiana Jones series would eventually surpass it. But that is mere nit-picking in the face of a film of great craft and vision, a film which proves that simple entertainment can be smart and that, under the right circumstances, people enjoy being scared.

Rating:
Verdict: Pure and simple terror

The Clonus Horror (USA, 1979)
Directed by Robert S. Fiveson
Starring Timothy Donnelly, Paulette Breen, Dick Sargent, Peter Graves

With the decline of the theatrical double bill and the rise of multi-million-dollar movie marketing, the term 'B-movie' has become derogatory shorthand used to dismiss a film's content or production values. This is a shame when you consider both the innate ropey charm of certain B-movies and in many cases their ability to explore more interesting and edgy ideas than many of their mainstream competitors. The Clonus Horror (a.k.a. Parts or Clonus) is a good illustration of both arguments.

The Clonus Horror is part of a wave of low-budget dystopian sci-fi films which reached their peak in the 1970s. Like Soylent Green it depicts a future in which mankind literally feeds on itself to survive, shrouding the modern equivalents of cannibalism behind a veil of scientific endeavour and an appeal to old-fashioned values. There are also nods to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the perfect nature of the compound monitored by constant surveillance, and the ear tags worn by the clones are similar to those in George Lucas' debut, THX 1138.But by far the film's closest cousin is The Stepford Wives. The clones are conceived as perfect specimens of men and women both physically and mentally. They are regularly tested to ensure their development and are instilled with the values of the American dream - only instead of serving their husbands both domestically and sexually, they are insanely ambitious and go all wide-eyed at the very mention of America. As a bonus, the very stilted delivery that we would expect from this unique conditioning helps to disguise any real deficiencies in the acting department.

Other problems with The Clonus Horror, however, are far more noticeable and less easy to forgive. The production values are very low - as with Gregory's Girl, it looks like a film in which everyone was asked to bring their own clothes to use as costumes. The film is shot on low-quality stock and the director, Robert S. Fiveson, resorts to a lot of exterior shooting, presumably to save time and money on interior set-ups.While this decision on its own might make sense, it also results in a number of visual shortcomings. The film is not well-directed by any means, and the abundance of exterior shoots leads to a multitude of unnecessary lens-flares or distracting light changes. The composition of certain shots is ramshackle to the point of being unintentionally funny - for instance, the scene of the woman sitting in front of the campfire in such a way that her backside looks like it is smoking. And there are lots of cheap 1970s shots of women's chests and short shorts, coupled with a typically unnecessary sex scene.

The plot of The Clonus Horror also has a number of shortcomings, with a story which is lacking in nuance and very contrived. We buy the idea of Richard breaking into 'America' to try and find out what is going on, but with all the cameras around he surely would have been discovered sooner. Certainly he wouldn't have had nearly enough time to read through all the files and watch a promotional tape about the Clonus project. Likewise it's strangely fortunate that the first person Richard runs into the real world just happens to be a friendly journalist who genuinely wants to help.Not only is the film contrived, it is also frequently silly. Part of this silliness comes from bad continuity - in one scene Richard goes from limping down a street, having been shot in the leg and the shoulder, to riding full-pelt on a child's bicycle to outrun a guard on a motorbike. The conversations between the retired journalist and his wife unintentionally wander into Dark Star territory, as if this is what Sergeant Pinback would have ended up doing had he made it safely back to Earth. And then there is the sequence in which said characters are dispatched - not by shooting, or being arrested, but by their entire house being suddenly blown up, for no apparent reason.

In additional to these issues, the film is on one level very televisual. Its story is slim enough to have been handled easily as a one-hour mystery drama or an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. The repeated use of monitors and computer screens give the film a small-screen feel, and there are hints of the work of Gerry Anderson in both the visuals and the characters; the drop-down microphones used by the guards wouldn't look out of place in an episode of Captain Scarlet.All that has been said so far makes out that The Clonus Horror is an abject failure in filmmaking. But in spite of its myriad flaws, the film manages to be sustained by its commitment to the ideas it explores, ideas which have subsequently formed the basis of Michael Bay's The Island and most recently Never Let Me Go. But unlike the former, The Clonus Horror could never be accused to allowing its ideas to get lost in favour of popcorn-pleasing spectacle.

This is confirmed by the film's somewhat misleading title. Despite its 18 certificate (downgraded to 15 in some territories) there is very little actual horror involved, whether gory or chilling. There is a certain amount of blood in the lobotomy scene, and the sequence of the clone being wrapped in plastic and screaming on the operating table, but that aside it's less The Clonus Horror than The Clonus Mystery. The creepiest scene finds Richard wandering into the underground freezer along the lines of plastic-covered clones, which both nods to the ending of The Stepford Wives and foreshadows David's revelation in the middle of AI.The central idea of The Clonus Horror is that people have been cloned, sometimes against their will, to provide a steady supply of replacement organs that will allow the political elite to all but live forever. The film satirises the concept of the American dream by equating 'America' with ordinary people unwittingly and unwillingly giving up their lives to benefit the wealthy and powerful. And unlike Soylent Green, the beneficiaries of this scheme are far from faceless, with Peter Graves' up-and-coming politician carrying himself like an elderly JFK.

There are numerous scenes in the film which address the ethics of cloning, with long conversations about whether the practice of cloning is moral and whether or not clones are human. Graves argues that cloning as a means of immortality would lead to many great world leaders being able to continue doing good: his brother argues the same could apply for Hitler and Stalin. The treatment of clones as second-class citizens, people who are capable of free will and emotion but viewed purely as a physical accessory, foreshadows the examination of replicants in Blade Runner.There are other interesting ideas which the film touches on. As part of their weekly programme, the clones go to 'confession', whereby they ask questions to a computer about things they don't understand. The computer's responses are carefully filtered by the powers-that-be to reassure the clones - an action which depicts organised religion is something which uses ignorance to manipulate ordinary people. Likewise there are the legions of doctors on whose every word the clones hang without question. The film is hinting at the privileged position of doctors and medicine in our society, who have taken over from priests as the main source of societal guidance which is never questioned and consistently held up as trustworthy.The Clonus Horror is a good example of a film which works mainly if not solely because of the strength of its convictions. For all the things that are wrong with it - and there is an awful lot - its ideas are interesting and intriguing enough to just about carry it through 90 minutes. It's not as in-depth an examination as Blade Runner, and it can't hold a candle to The Stepford Wives, but its constant commitment to its core ideas makes it more than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Substance over style

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (USA, 2008)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Shia LeBoeuf, Cate Blanchett

Nostalgia is a very dangerous thing. Having great memories of a certain point in one's life is fantastic, but any attempt to recapture that moment when everything around you has changed is bound to end in failure. All that remains once the forced smiles have disappeared is a sad sense of disappointment and an increased awareness of the rapid passage of time.

It is with a similarly heavy heart that we approach the fourth, but perhaps not final, Indiana Jones film, which comes 19 years after the original trilogy bowed out on a high with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It's been a long time coming, having gone through various scripts and directors since The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles wrapped in the mid-1990s. Steven Spielberg, who felt he had matured as a filmmaker since the originals, only agreed to make a fourth film if he could guarantee the fans something new and entertaining. And in all fairness, he has partially succeeded.The problem, as Spielberg readily admits, is that so much has changed since the original trilogy. On the one hand, there have been many films, if not entire franchises, which have unashamedly ripped off Indiana Jones. Romancing the Stone, Tomb Raider, National Treasure, even The Da Vinci Code, all try to do their own version of the films with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, the action genre has changed beyond recognition, through the work of John McTiernan, the Wachowskis, Paul Greengrass and (unfortunately) Michael Bay. Just as James Bond looks out of place next to Jason Bourne, so Indiana Jones feels at best like affectionate old hat.

What this all means is that 'Indy 4' has the dual burden of having to update the series to give it a relevance or purpose, while also retaining the nostalgic, B-movie aesthetic and pantomime content which made the originals so much fun. To everyone's surprise, and some disappointment, what we end up with is just more of the same. It's delivered every bit as efficiently and light-heartedly as the originals, but with an even more deliberate nostalgia and not much of an attempt to argue its case for existing.Proof of this is easily found in the plot, which borrows heavily from the first three films. The central strand, about recovering an ancient religious artefact which may have magical powers, is a straight lift from Last Crusade, only with Mayan mythology rather than Christian icons. The involvement of foreign armies (the Russians on this occasion) sits very closely to Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Cate Blanchett's character filling in for both the poncy archaeologist and the Gestapo officer. And the scenes of underground tribal warriors clearly resemble the mine scenes in Temple of Doom, with vague, heavily watered-down hints of Apocalypto.

All that has been said so far makes the film seem like a simple case of George Lucas betraying the fans that made him rich and famous, ruthlessly milking a cash cow while flogging a dead horse. One of the big criticisms centres on the involvement of aliens in the story, which brings with it a lot of special effects and the kind of preposterous mythological dialogue which was already quite silly when The Omen was being made.But, at the risk of a massive backlash, this idea is more or less in keeping with the spirit of the series even if its execution is not. The work of Erich von Däniken, about the possibility of extra-terrestrial influence on prehistoric societies, is every bit as preposterous as the legend of the Holy Grail - it doesn't in itself make the story any less compelling or entertaining.

Just like its predecessors, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is at heart an upmarket B-movie, which pays tribute to the matinee idols and boys' own adventures of Lucas' and Spielberg's youth. The new material (well, I say new) is handled in the same pulpy way as the other plots: it matters in relation to keeping up with the story, but you don't have to go away and think about it afterwards. And the film does a fairly decent job of showing how certain aspects have moved on; there's a sad moment of Indy looking at photos of Henry Jones Sr. and Marcus Brody on his desk, but we don't linger on the details long enough for it to get mawkish.Spielberg has always been as his best directing light-hearted, crowd-pleasing popcorn fodder; even when the films are familiar in terms of story and themes, they are better assembled and more engaging than his 'serious' works. And in this film there is a lot of fun to be had. There's nothing quite as witty as the sword vs. gun fight in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or all the banter between father and son in Last Crusade. But the scene where a fight breaks out between the rockers and the jocks to the sound of 'Shake Rattle & Roll' is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.Like the originals, there is an element of silliness involved. If you find yourself losing it when Indy survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined fridge, then you're not going to get through it. But for those of us who are left, the film manages to keep up the entertainment just enough for us not to notice. Let's be honest, if you handle a guy who manages to survive such amazing stunts, even at this ripe old age, then a prospect of crystal aliens or a sand-based obelisk with a lake underneath isn't going to faze you.The stunts and set-pieces in Crystal Skull are also generally well-played. Most of them refer directly back to the previous films - the truck chase through the jungle begins almost exactly like the truck chase in the first film. Others are more generic, such as the cars racing along a cliff or driving a motorcycle through a building. As before, these scenes are unremarkable but efficiently delivered, and they deserve credit for mostly avoiding CGI, with Harrison Ford still doing most of his own stunts.

The performances are all quite enjoyable, like seeing old friends again after a long time apart. Ford, who has become noticeably grumpier off-screen, handles the older persona of Henry Jones Jr. pretty well, proving he is still skilled with the whip and can deliver one-liners every bit as tartly. It's good to see the feisty Karen Allen back on screen, and her character is much more substantial than either of Indy's other conquests - as he says himself, the problem with the others was that "they weren't you".Elsewhere we have John Hurt and Cate Blanchett having a good time chewing the scenery, and Ray Winstone turning even the silliest line into something vaguely threatening. The one weak link is Shia LeBoeuf, who isn't convincing either as Indy's son or as a rebel-without-a-cause. When he first romps on screen, looking like a kid dressing up as Marlon Brando, you sort of forgive him and expect improvement. But he simply isn't charismatic enough to carry the film, let alone any future instalments.

But the main problem, which stops Crystal Skull from being just another decent film, is the ending. The actual ending, with Indy and Marion getting married, isn't a problem at all: it's a fitting way for these characters to wind up and Spielberg's sentimentalism isn't out of place. But the scenes preceding it, with the crystal skeletons merging and the flying saucer destroying a whole valley, do look for all the world like Lucas snuck behind the camera while Spielberg was on his coffee break. The special effects are poorly obvious, it's boring to watch and the characters are lost in the wide shots as everything blows up and nobody cares.Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a terrible film by any means. It recaptures the tone of the originals very well, something which is both its biggest strength and its greatest weakness. It is staggeringly unremarkable in its plot and execution, but at under 2 hours long it is much less bloated and baggy than either the Star Wars prequels or the Pirates of the Caribbean series. In the end, it's probably as good, if not slightly better than we had any right to expect. But if a fifth instalment should come along soon, it might not be so easily embraced.

Rating: 2.5/5
Verdict: Remarkably unremarkable