Film: High-speed nightmare

Also Showing: Breakdown Jonathan Mostow (15) Sliding Doors Peter Howitt (15) My Son the Fanatic Udayan Prasad (15)

Also Showing

Breakdown Jonathan Mostow (15)

Sliding Doors Peter Howitt (15)

My Son the Fanatic

Udayan Prasad (15)

At some point in the mid 1980s, American film-makers discovered that they were running low on partially undressed teenage girls willing to be chased around haunted houses by men in ski-masks, so they found a new breed to terrorise: the smug, white, middle-class male. Any character with a mobile phone and a sliver of ambition was immediately a candidate for torture; so many of them were making the trip to Hell and back that there was talk of establishing a frequent flyer programme. And now, just when you thought it was safe to start eating sun-dried tomatoes again, along comes Breakdown to put the cat among the yuppies.

Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan are crossing the barren American Southwest when their gleaming new Cherokee jeep stutters to a halt. You know they're heading for trouble because (a) they're blissfully happy and (b) the trucker who stops to offer them a lift is played by the late JT Walsh, an actor who conceivably gave his own mother nightmares. Quinlan hitches a ride with Walsh to the nearest pay-phone, but then disappears. What begins as a simple kidnapping becomes a disturbing cosmic conspiracy when Russell tracks down Walsh and harangues him about the whereabouts of his wife, only for the bewildered trucker to claim that he has no idea what Russell is talking about. To reveal any more of the plot would be to weaken its tightly interlocked chain of surprises.

Breakdown shares a sparseness and cruelty with its main influences - North By Northwest, Deliverance, The Vanishing and Steven Spielberg's first feature, Duel. Like those films, the picture utilises open space to menacing effect: the vulture's-eye compositions showing Russell dwarfed by mountains and canyons that would have made John Ford swoon are enough to inspire agoraphobic tendencies. Although the director and co-writer Jonathan Mostow introduces some salient commentary about masculinity, gun culture and the crumbling family unit, he does so without once putting the brakes on the action's juggernaut velocity. It's all tied together with such panache that you can find yourself wracked with gleeful giggles at the most inappropriate moments - during a dumb-as-they-come car chase, for instance, or as Russell follows in the footsteps of a hundred rich nitwit heroes before him and strays into a diner full of hicks with ZZ Top beards (and that includes the waitresses).

Sliding Doors is a wafer-thin romantic comedy set in two parallel universes. In the first, Gwyneth Paltrow rushes to catch the train home after losing her job, but misses it and so doesn't arrive in time to find her scallywag boyfriend (John Lynch) in bed with his lover (Jeanne Tripplehorn). In the second, she makes it on to the train, meets the pathologically zany John Hannah, gets home and catches Lynch and Tripplehorn in flagrante, then decides to ditch her old life along with her hairdo and agrees to go on a date with Hannah, who is supposed to be the movie's romantic hero but gets my vote for most irritating man in the movies. Ever.

Although Hannah's performance is badly misjudged, Paltrow is a sparky heroine, and her crisp English accent almost makes you forgive America for Dick Van Dyke. But I wish the writer-director Peter Howitt had taken his mildly daring ideas further. The film's closest cousin is Kieslowski's Blind Chance, in which a character running for a train was the catalyst for three divergent alternative realities, but Groundhog Day proved that art-house film-makers didn't have the exclusive rights on exploring parallel universes. Not only does Sliding Doors renege on the promises made by its scenario, it also fails to engage as either romance or comedy, unless you count the unfortunate coincidental reference to Gary Glitter, which provides the film's biggest laugh.

There are some interesting ideas in My Son The Fanatic, but they're all jumbled up with the sloppy characterisation, which is much more simplistic and hackneyed than we've come to expect from the writer Hanif Kureishi. The exception to this is the main character Parvez (Om Puri), a Pakistani taxi- driver whose fresh, progressive approach to racial integration in Britain places him at loggerheads with his son, a budding Muslim fundamentalist. Increasing the friction is Parvez's affection for the local prostitute Bettina. The fact that Bettina is played by the excellent Rachel Griffiths almost redeems her hooker-with-a-heart persona, but the memories of the Bob Hoskins/Cathy Tyson relationship in Mona Lisa which the film invites are much to its disadvantage.

Ryan Gilbey