The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

(Herald rating * *)

An entertainment by - and perhaps for - people with very short attention spans, this may be the most studied display of whimsy since The Magic Flute (although Mozart had better tunes; this film's music is mainly provided by a well-cut Brazilian cast member singing David Bowie classics in Portuguese).

It seems to pick up ideas, then put them down and forget where it left them. Thus it feels, in the end, like an assembly of gags no one ever really believed in - though some are very funny. Murray, who plays the title character, says at one point: "This sucks. I'm disappointed in myself." He's in character at the time, but it's easy to believe he's talking about the project and the director just decided to leave it in.

Zissou is pure Murray: in Hemingway beard and red beanie, he looks perpetually mournful, although his depressed demeanour may have something to do with his voracious appetite for marijuana. He purports to be an oceanographer although he works mainly on a series of wooden documentary films and never actually studies anything. Indeed, he remarks to an assistant at one point that "you know I can't keep up with the Latin names for all the fishes".

On the Belafonte, a converted submarine hunter, he cruises the oceans on an Ahab-like search for the shark that ate his best mate on the last voyage. The oddball complement includes engineer Klaus Daimler (Dafoe works a miracle here, making a German both funny and touching); a hormonally neurotic, heavily pregnant journalist (Blanchett) who is writing an article about Zissou; and a pilot (Wilson) who may or may not be Zissou's long-lost illegitimate son. Hovering on the fringes are Zissou's wife (Huston) and her ex-husband (Goldblum), Zissou's professional nemesis.

If the dramatis personae seems a little cluttered, when they start piling on the plot things get really messy. The narrative, which is at once banal and incoherent, is further hampered by a strangely inappropriate tone. The comedy is intended to be deadpan but feels underdone to the point of being mournful, so it's like watching sketches that were written at 45 rpm being played back at 33.

This is particularly notable when pirates seize the vessel, a scene which, in any case, may not go down well in the late Sir Peter Blake's country. Add to that the utterly fantastical nature of the action sequences (the 68-shot pistol) and the underwater ones (animated fish, cute but clumsy) and what you're left with is a very odd film indeed, a sort of comic dirge. The target audience may well be stoners who are having mid-life crises at 22. But it left me completely cold.

CAST: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, Noah Taylor
DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson
RATING: M (low-level offensive language)
RUNNING TIME: 118 mins
SCREENING: Rialto, Village