The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Herald rating: * * *

So, at last here it is - the film of the television comedy of the book of the radio series. It's taken light years to get to the big screen and author Douglas Adams - who is credited as screenwriter with Karey Kirkpatrick - didn't live to see his creation get a budget to match the size of his tangential imagination.

As such, surviving members of the HGTTG cult should be well-pleased. It's pretty much all there and faithful to the spirit of Adams' sci-fi satire and his ponderings of - all together now: life, the universe and everything.

Yes, there is now a romantic subplot between Arthur Dent (Freeman, late of The Office), Trillian (Zooey Deschanel, possibly cast because her name sounded like one of the story's extraterrestrials).

And, yes, it has been Americanised to some extent. More disturbing is just how much early parts of the film are a blatant ad for a certain Finnish brand of mobile phone.

But it remains an enjoyable, wacky - if ill-paced and often incoherent - oddball of a movie, the nearest relations of which are The Fifth Element, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Time Bandits.

So, no, like those films, check your requirement for logic and narrative momentum at the door. There's not much of either on offer here, which in its own way is true to the spirit of Adams' episodic original work.

It's more a film of bits that work and bits you have to get through to get to the next bit. It unravels badly with the bits involving supercomputer Deep Thought and all that business about the answer to the ultimate question. And the encounter with John Malkovich's nasally-obsessed religious leader Humma Kavula is an extended sketch in need of a punchline.

None of the cast really leave much of an impression. Freeman certainly makes his Arthur Dent extraordinarily ordinary, while Rockwell's Zaphod Beeblebrox is irritating - as the role requires - in a cut-price Jim Carrey kind of way.

What's off most, though, seems to be the comedic timing. Even Marvin the paranoid android, voiced by Alan Rickman, isn't as funny as he should be, although Adams' quaint tone survives in the narration of the Guide itself from Stephen Fry, complete with nifty graphics.

Hitchhiker's gets an apt one-thumb-up.

CAST: Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Mos Def, John Malkovich, Bill Nighy
DIRECTOR: Garth Jennings
RATING: PG (low level violence)
RUNNING TIME: 109 mins
SCREENING: Village Hoyts Berkeley cinemas from Thursday