The world is not short of rotten films. Just look at the cinema ads at the back of this newspaper: Scary Movie 2; Crocodile Dundee in LA; Angel Eyes. Each one an absolute stinker - and you can rest assured there's plenty more where they came from.
So amid all this dross, why get riled about one movie in particular? Maybe it's because the expectations raised by AI: Artificial Intelligence were so high. Perhaps it's the many enthusiastic reviews which Steven Spielberg's "futuristic fairy-tale" has received (although there have been some dissenting voices). Maybe it's because it's rare enough for a Hollywood movie to even pretend to address Big Themes such as love, death and what it means to be human, and therefore even more disappointing when the result falls so horribly flat.
But take it from me, AI is a creepy, shallow piece of work which leaves a nasty aftertaste in the mouth. If this is the best that the most successful US director of his generation can do, then maybe it's time for him to hang up his viewfinder.
For those who (absurdly) hold Spielberg single-handedly responsible for the decline of US cinema and the rise of the brain-dead blockbuster, this will come as no surprise. But those of us who admired the craft and showmanship of such films as Jaws and ET, and were at least partly impressed by some of the more visceral sequences in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, will be deeply disappointed.
Spielberg has made downright bad movies before - the shambolic Hook and turgid Amistad spring to mind - but none as inept as this. Bequeathed by the late, great (and, truth be told, long declining) Stanley Kubrick to Spielberg as a project in development, AI is a futuristic Pinocchio story, with William Hurt as the Gepetto figure, a high-tech puppet-maker who dreams of creating synthetic love (yuk). In fact, Hurt's character most closely resembles Basil Exposition, the gormless MI6 functionary who pops up in the Austin Powers films to fill in the gaping plot holes with long-winded explanatory monologues.
You have to feel sorry for the entire cast, of whom only Jude Law emerges with any credit, bringing some swagger to his role as a gigolo android. Brendan Gleeson snarls and cracks his whip to little avail in the much-vaunted Flesh Fair sequence, which is about as shocking as a Limp Bizkit video and makes much less sense. The usually excellent Frances O'Connor is left hanging out to dry in what should be the key role of the mother, her motivations and emotions unexplained. So we're left with dewy-eyed, sepulchral Haley Joel Osment to carry the narrative as the child-android designed to love his "mother" (let's not even get into the non-sequiturs and inconsistencies in the film's explanation of what this "love" is or how it works) and cast out into a cruel world where he must fend for himself.
Pinocchio is the key reference point here, although there are also clumsy nods to The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan and the Brothers Grimm. Crucially and damningly, though, there is no sense of wonder or magic - none of the stardust which Spielberg sprinkled on Close Encounters and ET 20 years ago.
It's pointless but still impossible not to wonder what Kubrick would have done with this material. Certainly, we would have been spared the paint-by-numbers plotting and exposition in favour of a more opaque, less obviously banal storyline. The misanthropy which lurks below the surface of AI would undoubtedly have been more to the fore, which would have been no bad thing. And, going by the evidence of Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, it's likely that the finished film would have been even more boring than Spielberg's - which would be quite an achievement, as AI is, as well as everything else, deeply, deeply tedious. There would surely have been at least a few bravura sequences, shot and re-shot over many months at horrendous expense, which would stick in the memory no matter what we thought of the film as a whole.
Instead, with one exception (the shot of a partly-drowned Manhattan), AI is visually underwhelming, its dystopian future poorly imagined and drawing too heavily on the visions of Blade Runner and Mad Max. Above all, we would surely have been spared this mixture of candy-coated sentimentality and moral vacuity. It appears that Spielberg holds out little hope for the human race, but his main obsession is with a Never Never Land of infant safety with an idealised (and crudely drawn) mother figure. One is reminded of another US icon, the increasingly revolting Michael Jackson, whose kitschy fantasies of childhood have long bordered on the fetishistic.
Like Jackson, Spielberg has succeeded in creating a world which mingles absurd whimsy with bleak hopelessness. Artificial intelligence? More like sentimental nihilism.
AI is on general release