10,000BC

Tigger grew up to be an anti-social moody teenager.

We were promised an historical epic. We were promised an entertaining blockbuster.

Heck, all of the trailers promised us a great big sabre-tooth tiger battle. And we were lied to. Roland Emmerich has to be the luckiest man working in Hollywood today.

This is yet another turgid, messy and technically incompetent effects movie from the director of Independence Day, Godzilla and The Patriot.

And with 10,000BC set to be yet another massive hit for him, there appears to be no end in sight to the production line of films Emmerich is making.

D’leh (Steven Strait) is a young man who is desperate to claim the white spear as head of his tribe and also the hand of the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle).

His father left the tribe and put Tic Tic (Cliff Curtis) in charge and as such he has become a surrogate keeping a great secret from the rest of his people.

As the annual mammoth hunt begins, D’leh is crowned with the hunter title but before he can celebrate his beloved is captured by a group of slave traders.

They are headed to the great pyramids with D’leh and Tic Tic in pursuit. Their mission appears futile as they are hideously outnumbered with their best fighters also captured or killed.

But a fateful encounter with a sabre-tooth tiger convinces numerous other tribes that D’leh is a leader of men as has been prophesised, and so he follows his father's footsteps to free all the people of the land.

Trust me, it sounds more exciting than it actually is ... and it doesn’t even sound that great. Utterly derivitive in terms of plot, the historical inaccuracies are plentiful, but they are so obvious you could well let them slide and assume we were meant not to take it seriously.

However that doesn’t excuse the leaden action and plodding narrative that fail to inspire, and some of the "special" effects are truly awful. The animals move in a jerky manner making them look fake from the off, and the best of them (a ferocious if still slightly unconvincing Sabre-tooth Tiger) makes only a brief cameo appearance.

The sets for the final act are excellent, but the action imposed upon them distracts, as they are so predictable. The film rushes to its conclusion with huge gaps in logic filled in by lingering shots of the female lead in various exotic costumes.

Trying to blend mysticism and realism is another of 10,000BC's many flaws — especially in the finale, which makes a mockery of the small amount of plot that has gone before it.

The film is unable to inspire on any level. It even fails to deliver any violence or gore, with the camera cutting away the very moment you want it to focus — just to get a family-friendly rating.

Inferior to Mel Gibson’s increasingly impressive Apocalypto, the film is dated and old-fashioned ... and not in a good way.

1.5/5

Hop to Screenjabber.com for Stuart O'Connor's 'thoughts' on Roland Emmerich, we warn you, it's not going to be pretty.

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