CONSPIRACY THEORY (39)

Directed by: Richard Donner

Starring: Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, Patrick Stewart

The Pitch: A paranoid New York cabbie realises that one of his "conspiracy theories" must actually be true - but doesn't know which one.

Theo Sez: How can I be so ungrateful about such a brave and unusual summer movie? Actually, it's easy : long before its terminally silly "double" ending - first bittersweet, then feelgood - this has degenerated from a very-cool-if-seriously-flawed action thriller to a thoroughly dreadful movie with occasional redeeming features. Gibson is startlingly offbeat, staking out the Logorrhoeic Australian territory previously occupied by Geoffrey Rush : the surface quirkiness is no big deal, being par for the course for actors trying to "stretch themselves", but it's a shock to see Mel Gibson coming over all gauche and nerdy ("Come into my humble abode") when he finally gets the heroine in his apartment ; unfortunately, even as he remains solid, the film collapses around him. The promising plot (as outlined above) turns out to be a red herring, giving way to a half-baked MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE pastiche (with a psychedelic torture scene by way of THE IPCRESS FILE), clumsily paced and lazily plotted : it's the kind of film where our heroine is relatively calm about having been tear-gassed and almost killed but totally freaks out when she finds the hero's been spying on her, throwing him out of her apartment (though he's patently the only person who can shed some light on what's going on) ; and I won't even go near that "Catcher in the Rye" bit, if only because it can't possibly be as absurd as it seems (can it?). A misfire, though at least with enough sparks in its early scenes to be an entertaining one : I'm not sold on the Grateful Dead as British secret agents, but the idea of Nobel Prize-winners' parents being forced by the government to donate semen at gunpoint has a certain mad genius about it.