Watchmen

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Comic epic's adaptation as faithful as it is grim.

So far as being yet another adaptation of the celebrated comic book works of Alan Moore, the

Watchmen

movie is quite something.

Unlike

From Hell

,

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

or

V for Vendetta

, most of its two and half hours are faithful to Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' late 80s series which deconstructed caped crusader conventions and had its superheroes taking sides with Cold War superpowers.

It's pretty much all here in this often outlandish, frequently nasty movie which treats the book as sacred text and emerges largely tediously linear as a result.

The ending, though, isn't as nutty as the graphic novel, instead resembling that of the first season of TV's

Heroes

- or just another save-the-world action film. The Moore-geeks won't be pleased.

As he's done before, Moore himself took his name off the project but Gibbons' remains. Director Snyder uses his original frames as storyboards and then adds the sort of stylised brutality which marked his digitally-dull previous comic-to-screen Spartan war bash-about

300

.

But in being so reverent and amping up the violence,

Watchmen

becomes a long hard slog, once the quite brilliant opening montage is over. It also, like the Thatcher era

V for Vendetta

, seems trapped in an alternative 80s time capsule, where Nixon has won the Vietnam War and is ensconced in the White House with his finger hovering above the button marked "nuke Russia". But when it frequently flashes back to the

Watchmen

's precursors, the Minutemen,

it neatly creates its own noir-ish mythology based on 20th Century US history, a bit like James Ellroy's

American Tabloid

, only with superheroes, but much worse lines.

Its most startling visual and acting element is the perpetually blue, almost perpetually naked

uber

-hero Dr Manhattan (Crudup), a nuclear scientist rendered a virtual god by getting a little close to an experiment. But boy it's a little hard to concentrate on his cosmic existentialism - delivered in a voice recalling

2001

's HAL - when it looks like you are being flashed by a steroid-powered Smurf.

The other show-stealing Watchman is Rorschach (Haley, riveting with his mask on or off), who thinks someone is out to get the supposedly retired masked avengers after the murder of gun-nutter The Comedian. after that the plot turns more labyrinthine with occasional stops for sex scenes, cleavers to the head, buzzsaws to the arm, a sexual assault among other memorable moments, set to a particularly random soundtrack.

All might remind how oh-so hard-boiled and transgressive the

Watchmen

concept is. But whatever it was that kept

Watchmen

readers entertained is sadly absent for

Watchmen

viewers.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman

Director:

Zack Snyder

Rating:

R16 (sex, violence, offensive language)

Running time:

163 mins

Screening:

SkyCity, Hoyts, Berkeley