Big enough for webs of human drams, small enough for the character and personality giant cities with their neon anonymity can never offer, small towns are the breeding ground for love, old-world values and family. But there’s a dark side to many of them…

1. Barrow, Alaska

30 Days of Night, 2007

There’s no better place to hunker down and stay indoors with the fire burning and a huge stash of DVDs. Only this year, you’d better stock up on crucifixes, garlic and the odd axe as well. For a band of roving vampires, a small town cut off from civilisation by impenetrable weather high above the Arctic Circle where the sun descends for a whole month at a time is a smorgasbord.

2. Machine

Dead Man, 1995

Jim Jarmusch’s alt western serves up a picture of the brutal frontier we’ve never seen before. Machine is an allegory for the lawlessness not just of the frontier but the rise of the amoral robber barons. Mild mannered accountant William (Johnny Depp) is the opposite, straight laced and buttoned down, but the brutality of the place quickly transforms him into everything he abhors about it – a lawless gunslinger on the run, led by a heathen when a local native takes him in.

3. Gunnison, Colorado

Alien vs Predator: Requiem, 2007

If only because of the budget, the besieged Predator ship from the end of the original AVP might have crashed into the middle of Los Angeles or Tokyo. But if you happen to live in the small Rocky Mountain town (maybe not far from South Park), you’re in for it. In this land of white picket fences and howdy neighbours, is the invasion of godless aliens a 9/11 parable? You decide.

4. Fargo, North Dakota

Fargo, 1996

Whenever there’s a huge stash of money buried in the snow, there’s going to be blood, and no matter what your motivations it’s going to affect you. It starts with a seemingly harmless swindle when Jerry (William H Macy) tries to have his wife kidnapped so he can engineer a ransom from his wealthy father in law. But the sleeting snow and forbidding winds of Fargo are the Cohen’s device to portray the chill winds in the hearts of men, and the snow covers everything – money, footsteps, blood, even the funny lookin’ guy who’s gone through a garden mulcher.

5. Woodsboro

Scream, 1996

Its bad enough that the mother of local girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) was murdered a year before, but on the anniversary of her death a killer strikes again, bumping off kids Sidney knows and then working his way through her friends. Could her mothers’ murder be related? Worse still, how do you escape a killer who knows all the rules of slasher film lore and still resist the temptation to say ‘I’ll be right back?’

6. Haddonfield, Illinois

Halloween, 1978

Unlike Rob Zombie’s 2007 redux, we don’t see exactly what made Michael Myers snap, but one Halloween night he murdered his entire family, sparing only his baby sister Laurie before clamming up for good and developing a disturbing mask fetish. Michael grows up to be about seven feet tall and virtually indestructible, and when he escapes from the institution where he’s spent most of his life, only his doctor – Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) – knows for sure where he’s going. As if Laurie (Jamie Curtis) doesn’t have enough worries with school and boys, now she has a psychotic serial killer brother butchering anyone who stands in the way of his quest to reach her.

7. Akron, Ohio

The Dead Next Door, 1988

One of movie history’s many zombie plagues starts in an Akron basement where a scientist accidentally unleashes something terrible. Fast-forward a few years and the country is overrun with the hungry living dead. A government task force (the Zombie Squad) is sent in, complete with a crappy early 80s sedan with Zombie Squad stickers peeling off the doors that probably belonged to the producer’s Mum. Worse still, Akron is home to a religious cult that considers the zombies the inevitable fate of humanity, all who oppose them infected with the virus or fed to the hordes they keep caged up.

8. Lumberton

Blue Velvet, 1986

On the surface, Lumberton’s a postcard-perfect place, thriving off the timber industry and full of white picket fences and friendly neighbours. But when David Lynch makes a movie about your town, the psychotic, oxygen-addicted drug dealer/killer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) is only the last stop in a twisted path of bizarre threats to your sexuality, the burgeoning relationship with the police chief’s daughter, your sanity and your life.

9. Kingston Falls

Gremlins, 1986

Producer Steven Spielberg and director Joe Dante made no secret of homaging It’s a Wonderful Life’s Bedford Falls in their rollicking creature feature, even having the film playing on TV in several scenes. The location was key for an invasion of savage, knee-high monsters, however – the American nightmare of the prototypical small town falling victim to horrors from chemical warfare to invaders speaking a strange language.

10. Santa Mira, California

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

Were director Don Siegel and original author Jack Finney commenting on the effects of modern life to turn people into soulless automatons decades before George A Romero in his definitive Dawn of the Dead? We might never know, but there’s a reason it happened in a small California community not unlike Santa Monica rather than the Midwest or New England, with writers, directors and studio executives terrified for their livelihoods thanks to the commie witch hunt that was devastating their ranks. Reds under the bed or not, remember – you’re next! You’re next!

On the way there they run into other holidaymakers, including a slightly scary former special forces soldier Nick (Olyphant) and his girlfriend Gina.

When the trail gets more difficult and soft-hearted screenwriter Cliff feels more out of his depth, the news from the mainland doesn’t help when it’s revealed a brutal serial killer is murdering young holidaymakers just like he and his wife.

Wanting nothing more than to ditch Nick and Gina but trying not to be realistic about it and, Cliff and Cydney try to stay calm as the enigmatic Nick appears to unravel a bit more every day.

It won’t really surprise you that there’s a huge twist the story revolves around, and the suckerpunch is revealed with little delicacy as a minute-long sequence lays out everything you thought you knew the way it actually happened. It’s handled a little clumsily but if you’re a fan of twist endings it’ll make you smile when you learn the extent of the secret.

Aside from the big reveal the film is well done. Pitch Black director Twohy makes good use of the jungle exteriors of Hawaii’s island of Kaui and he elicits a mood of menace and danger quite effectively.

Writer/director Rupert Glasson uses the bleak climes of the remote seaside South Australia town location to great effect, whether it’s the sprawling house where Jessie (Lisa Chappell) and Rob (Robert Taylor) live or the seafood processing plant Jessie works at.

We meet the married couple in the midst of fertility dramas that threaten the marriage as emotions run high, so Jessie’s easy prey for the good looking young Irish itinerant Evan who’s drifted into town and got a job at the plant.

A fight and a drunk night out later and Jessie finds herself in bed with Evan (or more accurately, laying back among the fish heads). Wishing nothing more than to forget it ever happened when she sobers up, Jessie finds she can’t for two reasons.

Not only is she pregnant with a baby she assumes can’t be her husband’s, but Evan won’t take no for an answer, apparently believing they’re meant to be together and showing up in her life in increasingly creepy circumstances that soon turn deadly.

It’s a well-structured, high quality looking film and while it doesn’t quite produce the nerve-sawing chills of Wolf Creek it’s definitely in the same class and if you want an effective thriller, it’s worth your time.

There’s another digital book revolution close behind the Kindle, iPhone and ebook – that of printing ever shorter runs of books digitally. It might not overhaul the industry but it’s going to affect you somehow whether it’s keeping older titles alive or opening the market for small and self publishers to compete.

It can mean anything from a handful to a few thousand copies, and in the quantities lies the rub. We live in a world where the consumer expects to be able to find and buy anything they want in just a few clicks. Fulfilling that desire from the blockbuster to the niche is what digital short run print is all about.

Muscling In

Ironically it’s not a new concept. Since the advent of digital publishing in the 80s books have been made from electronic files, and businesses like Sydney-based Wild and Woolley have offered short digital print runs for self published authors for almost 20 years.

The key is quality. Most digitally printed books were presented on cheap paper with amateurish graphics that simply couldn’t compete with those from an experienced publisher. Today you can put a digital book beside a traditionally printed one and be hard pressed to see the difference.

The reason is because printers who live and breathe books are positioning themselves to take advantage of a market everyone agrees is full of potential. “There’s a lot of very ordinary digital print produced by digital printers,” says Griffin Press national sales manager Warren Griffin. “We’re using the same materials we use in offset. Corner shop style commercial printers generally use readily available digital materials and it just isn’t the same sort of book, the binding qualities aren’t there. The feedback we’re getting is fantastic because we understand what makes a book aside from ink on paper.”

For the unwary, digital has potential stumbling blocks. As outlined above, not doing your homework or giving your project due diligence can be a disaster – the field is rife with dodgy cut-price promises but for all digital printing’s benefits, it’s cheap compared directly with traditional offset printing.

Lionel Marz, Australian and New Zealand sales director for Chinese book printer Everbest relates a story about a client who’d been badly burned. “She’d paid in excess of AUS$30 per copy for 100 copies of an illustrated children’s book printed by a short run digital printer,” Marz says. “She reprinted 2,000 copies with us for less than what she’d paid for the original 100 and there was a very noticeable difference in the quality we produced versus the short run digital product.”

But the cost is making digital more compelling and if you go to right place they’re used the technology to drive it way down. At Griffin Press, Warren Griffin reports that the unit price to produce 1,000 to 1,500 copies digitally is now comparable to that of doing so the ‘old’ way. That of course means you aren’t restricted to a 1,000 minimum, so cost savings in warehousing, distribution and handling further sweeten the deal.

The digital spectrum

Random House recently forged an alignment with Sydney-based digital printer SOS Print and Media to produce digitally printed short run books on an ongoing basis (SOS director Michael Schultz told B+P he’d experienced ‘amazing growth’ in the sector). “We distribute Random House UK titles,” says Random House’s Schwarz, “so if someone orders one copy we’re air freighting it from the UK. If you can print those files here you’re taking out freight costs and can turn an order around much quicker. With local titles the value might not have been there to keep some books in print, but digital means we won’t have to, for the benefit of authors as well as the consumer.”

So while the agreement has a profit motive, it’s very much about keeping up with the demands of consumers already used to getting what they want. “We take a reduced margin,” adds Schwarz, “but it’s about service and availability more than anything else.”

At the other end of the publishing spectrum, Henry Rosenbloom saw a lot of activity surrounding ebooks at 2009s Frankfurt Book Fair but very little about digital print and its potential to open the market to the so-called long tail. The publisher of Victorian independent Scribe Publications believes the two are going to occupy very different market sectors that are driven from different directions.

“I don’t think ebooks are consumer led at all,” Rosenbloom says. “They’re an attempt by businesses to create models that will make money. Print on demand is more a reaction to the fact that print runs have been falling around the world and publishers have been trying to find a way they can keep books in print when they couldn’t justify a conventional print run.”

Rosenbloom is also quick to add that so far, short run digital print on demand won’t light any balance sheets on fire. “It’s extremely marginal,” he says, “print on demand is for books with a continuing demand where the numbers are small. So we’ll reprint small quantities –anything from 25 to 500 copies – but the unit costs are higher so it’s a trade off between cost and availability and it’s a problem for publishers really.”

A segment that’s bought print on demand books very much into the mainstream is the independent, often web-based publishers who’ve ridden the crest of the ebook wave in niche genres like erotic romance or sci-fi. Laurie Sanders runs US-based ebook romance publisher Black Velvet Seductions and digitally printed copies of her books are as important to her service as any other format.

“[Print on demand] lets us to offer our books to readers who prefer to hold a paper book to turn real pages,” she says. “It’s important to authors that we distribute books in as many formats as we can so as many people as possible can read their books. Print on demand lets us do that without printing vast quantities we’d have to store until orders came in. It takes out the guesswork and makes us more competitive.”

But even if print on demand has taken off hand in hand with the internet-enabled groundswell of niche publishers, won’t the sector now be under threat if much bigger publishers and printers can compete with them on the same turf, producing a single copy at a time?

Sanders sees it merely putting them on her level. “I don’t see it as a threat,” she says. “If traditional publishers went to electronic or digitally printed books and stopped accepting returns from booksellers who buy more than they can sell, we’d all be on even ground when it comes to distribution. We compete very well where the playing field is level.”

Fit to print

Griffin Press went to a lot of effort and expenditure installing high quality digital output equipment not long before the world’s finances tumbled. With economic recovery building, Griffin’s found itself with the systems ready at a time when interest in digital short runs are gripping the publishing industry.

“We’re very much at a tipping point,” Warren Griffin agrees to B+P’s first thesis about the Kindle and iPhone changing the game. But he doesn’t necessarily think consumer demand is driving it. “A host of other issues from inventory management to keeping some books alive has been doing that. Digital print has been in the background for some time but some of the back end tools we’re using have come together over the last 12 months.”

Such systems have streamlined Griffin’s digital workflow to the extent that the smallest print run the company can handle economically is a single copy. That’s not trials or system tests either, it’s work Griffin is doing for contracted customers right now. More optimizations will see it offered to any customer that comes in the door in 2010.

Of course, digital printing is what you do every day on your desk-bound inkjet. It’s easy and – in a manner of speaking – cheap. The Espresso, an in-store book printing and binding plant that’s been running in Angus & Robertson’s Bourke Street Melbourne store since last September, does much the same thing on a larger scale.

So if the technology is so easy to deploy and use, will the revolution eat itself, putting printers out of work before the market even matures? While TIME magazine called the Espresso the invention of the year in 2007, recent reports have been less glowing. Stories about paper jams and interminable waits remind us of photocopying a report at work, not shopping for books.

“So far introducing a shopper to manufacturing has gone bad,” McPherson’s Greg Brown thinks. “You might want to see a pizza get made but you certainly don’t want to see a car get made, you just want to buy the car. People want us to take care of that – they want manufacturers. Putting a piece of manufacturing somewhere else diminishes the whole experience.”

Of course, there’s the old chestnut about how the Internet didn’t kill books and TV didn’t kill cinema. There’ll probably be a time and place for an Espresso (or even a smaller, home-based) book delivery and manufacturing machine. It’ll be just one in a myriad of services for different markets and circumstances.

Talking shop

So what about where the real action is, among booksellers with their huge variety of sizes, structures and marketing budgets? Even though digitally printed books can be a premium product, it doesn’t mean booksellers will happily pay more. As Scribe’s Henry Rosenbloom put it; ‘it’s very hard to raise the retail price because the consumer isn’t interested in how the book was produced’.

Some booksellers might fear technologies they feel will only eat further into their market share. Hasn’t Amazon gouged us enough without customers buying from fancy vending machines or downloading books on their iPhones?

Better Read Than Dead is ahead of the curve, with manager Sally Shilvers seeing the Sydney-based operation less as a simple bookstore than a merchant to connect you with what you want to read, whatever the platform. “I can’t wait till we have agreements that equitably manage the remuneration needed to just press a button and put content together in a designer book for a customer,” she says.

Shilvers also recognises that a good book store has a part to play in the buying experience by being an advisory and recommendation service, not just a shop – a service offering that’s hard to replicate elsewhere. “For a bookshop to survive it needs to be the first port of call for readers. I’d love to be able to bundle ebooks, print on demand or a book on the shelf so it’s a real choice for an Australian consumer to come into their local bookshop and not have to bring something in from America. I want it so they always want to come to Better Read Than Dead whether it’s via our website or into the store.”

Shilvers also believes some in the publishing field will see Espresso-type machines as a way to cut sellers out of the picture and increase profit margins even further, but she has faith customers – and publishers – will know where their bread’s buttered. “We’ve talked to publishers who still value the well entrenched relationships book sellers have with a very loyal community. I hope we can convince those publishers to stay loyal to us on that.”

Gavin Schwarz of Random House agrees when we ask about commercial pressures to cut out the retail middleman. “We have no intention of doing anything like that,” he says. “We’re a book publisher, not a book seller. Some publishers sell direct to consumers on their website but we’re not one of them.”

Even if the temptation to slash costs in bypassing the retail sector gets too much, it’s unlikely to weight in for awhile yet. Although print on demand is growing fast (Warren Griffin reports that it’s doubled on last year) casual estimates by most people approached for this story peg digital printing at less than one percent of the industry as a whole. It’ll certainly keep growing, but it’s less about expansion and more about finding efficiencies in the bloated return-and-pulp business model.

In fact, digital short run print will by definition remain small – if a small, cult or previously out of print book catches on, there’s more likelihood it’ll be shunted to a traditional mass volume and warehousing process.

And while Meyer, Rowling and King are still publishing’s bread and butter, they’re not that of Better Red Than Dead, a business for whom short run could end up the rule rather than the exception. “Our bread and butter is the books we recommend to our customers,” Sally Shilvers says. “We have books with better margins but our customers keep coming back because they’re happy with what we read and recommend. If we provide those books at a reasonable price fast enough it’ll enhance the experience for our customers.”

Supply and Demand

With the market pulling everyone in different directions, a commercial sweet spot is yet to be found. Allen & Unwin’s Elizabeth Weiss told the Weekly Book Newsletter Australian consumers were ready for ebooks but the systems aren’t in place yet, and there’s indeed been no industry-spawning device or solution that’s thrust the whole field into the mainstream like the iPod did for music.

Even if there is, Henry Rosenbloom reminds us it still won’t be that simple. “Theoretically, print on demand means no book ever needs to be out of print, but every book kept in print has an administrative burden attached,” he says. “You have to manage the stock, produce royalty statements every six months, etc. Sometimes it’s just not going to be worth the money you spend on it.”

For now though, short run digital printing is finding its feet. It won’t make anyone rich for the time being, but the industry has a lot of catching up to do to compete with Blu-ray players and Playstations. Getting as close as possible to the ubiquitous availability consumers now expect might be its best chance.

Rights and Wrongs

How about the people who set all this in motion – authors? Agent Selwa Anthony reports that contracts aren’t specifying anything about print on demand or ebook rights yet because the standard revision clause covers it.

“At the moment all good contracts have a revisions clause,” she says. “Basically it says a publisher has six months to reprint a book after requests to do so, and if they don’t the rights have to be reverted. But the author has to request it, it just doesn’t automatically happen.”

Defending Google contentious book search technology, writer and editor Lynne Spender recently told ABC Radio National about the new opportunities for authors, from ’subscriptions and consumer online purchasing and advertising’ to ‘per-page printing at public access terminals in libraries’.

That’s the only possible explanation for why Mutant Chronicles flopped so utterly in the US and showed up in Australia with no fanfare whatsoever on DVD despite being based on a successful video game and starring several big names.

It’s the far future and the Earth is mired in a war for resources fought constantly between a handful of 1984-style megacorporations that control everything. But the fighting destabilises a huge disc somewhere in the desert, and when it opens, mutant creatures with spears for arms crawl out, attacking people on a global scale and prompting a mass exodus of humanity to outer-space colonies.

A religious order’s kept the secret of the coming mutant outbreak for centuries, and Brother Samuel (Perlman) knows very well the prophecy says one of them must remain on Earth to assemble a cadre of holy warriors to defeat the mutant menace.

So he stays behind, putting together a team of killer-by-numbers heroes of every stripe to lead into battle, and for a movie of this genre they’re surprisingly fleshed out.

Is the movie brilliant? Absolutely not, but it has some great flourishes of action, visuals, characterisation and mood and it doesn’t pull punches when it comes to language, bloodshed or violence.

Newbie feature director Simon Hunter uses a tiny budget ($22m) to great effect with lots of Lord of the Rings-inspired miniatures made to look expansive and massive thanks to the camera wheeling and flying through them.

From the First World War trench battle style of the introductory coda to the extreme sci-fi of the rusty alien stronghold in the climax, he knows he’s making a silly popcorn movie, and he uses his camera and special effects to bolster it rather than use the script to wink knowingly at the audience.

But after a few forgettable models where the Blackberry’s distinctive design lost its way, the 8520 is back on track with the familiar layout, comfortable size and a miniature trackpad that makes getting around easy. If you’ve used a Blackberry before you’ll enjoy the familiar surroundings. If not it’s a great entry-level smartphone. Rating: 4

Apple’s long-rumoured tablet, the Google mobile, the rise of ereaders and 3D in the home will be among the technologies vying for your money this year. 2009 saw the continued rise of new movements in the digital sphere and the name of the game will be convergence, with new gadgets that do many more tasks than old generation tools.

The web has been full of rumours about the so-called ‘iSlate’, complete with unauthorised pictures claiming to be the device in development. Though notoriously secretive with new product announcements there was similar online chatter before the iPhone was unveiled, and Apple is said to be launching the product in March.

At approximately 11 inches and costing under US$1000, there’s no word on whether the device will come with Mac OSX orf the iPhone operating system, but reading ebooks and other content will be easy if the screen image reorients as you rotate the body like on an iPhone. Nationwide wi-fi subscriptions included in the price have been mentioned in the US media but no such plan has been talked about for the Australian market.

Google is expanding further into the mobile phone market with the launch of the Nexus One handset in four countries outside Australia. Google is refusing to comment on a local availability date.

Built by manufacturer HTC, the Nexus One runs on Google’s Android operating system. Searching online content using Google tools is easy using Android and the company hopes to compete with the iPhone application store with Android market.

The Nexus One’s release will put it in an interesting position in Australia. Because Android is already available on handsets produced by other manufacturers including Samsung and HTC itself, Google will be competing directly with providers it’s previously partnered with.

After the international launch of the Kindle ereader late last year, Amazon has followed up with the global launch of the Kindle DX. With a much larger body and screen than the original Kindle and native PDF support, it’s a better proposition for people who read preformatted pages such as textbooks.

Taking cues from the tablet computer world, you can reorient the screen according to how you want to hold the device.

As 3D continues to overtake cinema, home entertainment devices will start jumping on the bandwagon, replicating the experience in your home theatre or lounge room.

You can already buy 3D-ready TVs in Australia, though large sizes and high definition still means high prices. But the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show saw a slew of product announcements and prices will come down as they become mainstream. Samsung’s new generation LED Series 9 TVs are ready to display full 3D and have all the bells and whistles you’ll need like full HD (10180 pixel) viewing quality.

Sony announced its intention to bring 3D to your home in a wide variety of devices from movies on 3D Blu-ray DVD players to games 3D-capable Playstation games.

As the web delivers more video content, a range of tools will let you unshackle yourself from the computer to watch it on your TV. Services that let you search YouTube videos or download movies direct will become more common.

We’ve had the AppleTV device in Australia for some time, and US WebTV provider Boxee recently released the Boxee Box, a similar system to bring web content to your TV screen. The Boxee Box remote works as your normal TV remote but flips over to reveal a full qwerty keyboard for searching through all manner of web content.

Less headline-grabbing but just as important is the arrival of USB 3.0-enabled ports and devices throughout 2010. As we store more data, moving it between devices becomes more time consuming. The Seagate BlackArmor external hard drive is one of the first USB 3.0 releases and promises transfer speeds up to three times faster than usual.

After a bitter war between the two countries, two Finnish brothers join a contingent of Russian soldiers to map out the new border agreed upon by the peace accords. The eldest, a brutal soldier not proud of his deeds, mistreats a farming family who offers them lodgings when he suspects the man was an enemy sympathiser. After killing him the brothers lock his young daughter in a dark underground cellar and leave her.

The younger of the two is torn up with guilt at abandoning the innocent girl to die trapped and keeps seeing her, believing she’s following them even though his brother does his best to convince him she’s a casualty of war.

When the line goes straight through a forbidding swamp the party assume is uninhabited, they find a small village at the centre where the people are timid and guarded. Not far away is the sauna of the title, a low, squat building the size of a shipping container in the middle of a freezing pond, and records found in the village tell the men it’s a magical place that will cleanse them of their sins.

But they have to face them first, and after several of their party go inside and disappear without a trace, the younger brother follows them to absolve his guilt about the girl, only to find a grotesque version of her inside, her face gone and pouring black oil, hell bent on avenging herself.

The elder brother tries to hold onto reason to work out what’s gone so wrong and what the villagers are hiding, but he knows he’s going to have to step inside and face his transgressions sooner or later.

The story mostly makes sense although some of the best sequences – particularly the climatic one – will have you scratching your head even while you pick your jaw up off the floor. The picture is extremely high quality, every snowdrift and brooding tree rendered in vivid detail. You can almost feel the freezing crispness of the dirty water and hard-bitten ground, and while it won’t compete with far flashier horror efforts, The Sauna is something you’ve never seen before.

It’s 1987 and recent college graduate James (Eisenberg) gets bad news from his parents; his dad’s demotion is going to cost them serious money and rather than travel to Europe with his friend like he planned he has to stay home and get a loser summer job.

He does so in the creaky, cheesy theme park of the title and starts ingratiating himself into the politics of his co-workers, including making friends with an equally nerdy contemporary, idolising the cool maintenance guy (Reynolds) and pining for the dark, secretive Em (Stewart).

It’s from the same filmmaking team that bought us the more obtuse comedy Superbad, so there’s a lot of frathouse laughs but a slightly heavier dramatic edge few teen comedies manage as the cast of lost souls try to find their way in the world together.

Eisenberg plays himself by Stewart looks a little uncomfortable playing the broody smart girl, pulling her hair back to signify emotional turmoil a few times too many. Comic additions like Mottola regular Bill Hader as the folksy but slightly unhinged park manager add to the humour.

It fair to presume however that the Pang brothers aren’t completely responsible for this debacle, probably having had Disney executives hanging over their shoulders every time they said ‘action’ or ‘cut’. Still, they should have left such dross due to creative differences long before it was foisted on unsuspecting audiences.

As always, the sillier Nicolas Cage’s hair is, the worse the movie seems to be. The days where he’d mix up every brainless action movie like Con Air with a smart drama like Leaving Las Vegas seem long gone, this and 2009’s godawful Knowing his usual standard of late.

He plays an assassin for hire who lives by a handful of simple rules, is good at what he does and for whom the world is his playground to in which to work and disappear at his whim.

Yes it is all starting to sound familiar, and because you’ve seen this character fifty four thousand times it needed something very special to sell it further. Unfortunately, Cage phones in his performance as the hero takes on a sidekick to be his helper and falls in love with an angelic deaf-mute shop assistant in a pharmacy. For a guy who’s golden rule is no emotional ties, he training some random bozo off the street in his craft and pursuing a blushing damsel a little too easily.

How will he pull of his much-fabled One Last Job and get out with his life intact? Can he hide his living from his new beau (in one of the movie’s most ridiculous scenes he shoots two muggers dead right behind her which she doesn’t hear because she’s deaf)? Even more importantly, can Cage play any role lately that doesn’t make him look like a slack-jawed Great Dane that’s just been whipped?

Every action cliché is there, which is curious in such an absence of any real action.