PHENOMENON (42)

Directed by:Jon Turtletaub

Starring: John Travolta, Robert Duvall

The Pitch: Good-natured, none-too-bright handyman in a small town turns into a genius after contact with a magic light in the sky.

Theo Sez: Affable fairytale for the New Age, genuinely likable for much of its length - helped by the pastoral setting and Travolta's understated performance - at least until it gets sloppy, starts to babble on about personal energy and "the human spirit" and finally, jaw-droppingly, turns into a disease-of-the-week movie, complete with inspirational Learning and shameless one-year-later coda. Throughout, the film's take on that Hollywood (and American?) bugbear, intellectualism, is hard to work out. It uses the movies' symbols du jour to denote intelligence - books in a generalised, good-for-you way and, of course, chess - but seems to equate it less with knowledge per se than with spiritual knowledge, a deeper understanding of the universal energy one can tap into in order to become a Better Person. It seems to have been inspired less by character drama than by self-help books - or perhaps, like the thoroughly pleasant AOR music that throngs the soundtrack, not inspired at all.