Push

IT'S ONLY fair to give Paul McGuigan a little credit. The director of Gangster No 1has taken a stupid idea (similar to that in the recent, mindless Jumper) and attempted to treat it in an intelligent manner. The film is ultimately a failure, but it's the sort of failure you want to cuddle and feed soup to.

The script imagines that the world is full of young people with various startling telekinetic and telepathic powers. This youth can cause his friends to think themselves under attack by aliens. This fellow here has the ability to make planes fall from the sky. Another chap can divine future events. And so forth.

Pushbegins with dissolute, telekinetic Chris Evans being visited by adolescent seer Dakota Fanning and being asked to face up to his responsibilities as a super- being. After explaining several confusing visions, she persuades him to run backwards and forwards while evil government goons fire guns at them.

McGuigan has chosen to shoot the film in Hong Kong and, encouraging cinematographer Peter Sova to ape the riffs of the great Chris Doyle, he makes wonderful use of the city's half- built skyscrapers and seedy, weed- ridden courtyards. For the first 20 minutes of Push, viewers could be forgiven for thinking they had encountered a rare combination of intelligent style and popcorn entertainment.

Sadly, as the film progresses, the plot becomes ever more confusing and the thinness of certain performances becomes ever harder to ignore. Evans is bland. Fanning seems uncomfortable.

As for Camilla Belle, she manages to improve on previous, impressive efforts to impersonate an ever-so-slightly ambulatory column of teak. For much of the film she is under the spell of some mind-manipulator and must remain impassively static while delivering her lines in the manner of a Speak and Spell machine. It hardly needs to be said that she carries off this part of the performance rather well.

Directed by Paul McGuigan. Starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, Djimon Hounsou, Maggie Siff 15A cert, gen release, 111 min★★