Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson is a man hopelessly stuck in time. He’s a man living on past glories, unable to forge a future of any kind. As a result he’s doomed to live a life of poverty and doomed to debase himself in an effort to try and recapture some of the old magic. He’s a dinosaur who knows he’s a dinosaur, but he’s quite happy with that fact – it’s the world that changed and fucked itself up.

In one scene we see Randy playing a video game with a neighbourhood kid. But they don’t play a Wii or a Playstation 3. Instead they play on an NES. The reason for this is because this system has a wrestling game that has Randy on it. Because of his ego and his quiet narcissism, Randy couldn’t contemplate playing a more recent game. When he stopped being part of the mainstream, everything became irrelevant.

This attitude is echoed in a scene where Randy has a drink with Cassidy, a stripper who he’s hoping to start a relationship with. They talk about music and about how great Motley Crue and Guns ‘n’ Roses were. And then they discuss how awful the 90s were and how Kurt Cobain was a giant pussy. Now whether that’s the truth or not doesn’t matter. What matters is Randy’s inability to evolve as a person. Most people’s tastes change as they age. They discover new things and re-evaluate the things they used to like. But because the 90s coincided with a slump in Randy’s career, the decade, and everything in it, automatically sucks. Nostalgia constantly clouds Randy’s head.

Illustrating how dangerous this sort of nostalgia is, is a scene where Randy goes to a mini wrestling convention. It’s a terribly depressing affair. There are a bunch of old grapplers begging for scraps from their loyal fans – this is their pension fund. And everywhere Randy is reminded of the degeneration and decay that follows them around. One guy has an ankle bag connected to a catheter and another is in a wheelchair. Randy knows what could lie in wait for him, but seeing as he lives hand to mouth, and seeing as he’s not really qualified to do anything else, he knows that he must continue punishing his body.

However, Randy does try and make a living elsewhere. He has a job in a supermarket. And here we have some of the funniest and some of the most depressing moments. It’s fun to see Randy getting into his job (he works on the deli counter and begins to joke about with his customers) but it’s excruciating to see him get bullied by his dweeb of a boss – the guy mocks his wrestling career, saying that all he does is sit on other men’s faces. Wrestling is hardly a noble profession, and yes it’s ridiculous, but it’s also an incredibly tough way to make a living. And knowing this, and knowing how easily he could cripple his arsehole boss, you constantly want Randy to beat the guy up. You want him to do an Iron Sheik and break his back and make him humble. So it’s a crowd pleasing moment when Randy finally has enough and quits his crappy job.

But the scenes at the deli counter are also interesting for the way that we see Randy interact with people. What Randy lives for is approval. He wants to hear the crowd roar and he wants them to chant his name. So his job on the deli counter begins as a sort of performance. He’s trying to replace the thrill of a wrestling audience with something on a smaller scale. It works for a little while. Well, until the customers begin being a pain in the arse.

There’s also an excellent bit of filming before Randy makes his first appearance on the deli counter. We see him getting dressed and then we follow him through the building. For anyone who’s grown up on wrestling shows, this will immediately remind them of Raw or Smackdown or Nitro. And then to further highlight the similarities, just before Randy goes through the ‘curtain’, we hear the cheer of a crowd. Randy is trying to replace the irreplaceable – nothing will ever equal the thrill of going before a massive crowd. After entertaining thousands of people, everything else is destined to be an anti-climax.

The wrestling scenes themselves are disappointingly few, but they’re expertly filmed. They begin with a rather ordinary match but then we have a crazy hardcore bout. Here we have Randy, who doesn’t seem to be the hardcore type, debasing himself for a few extra dollars. We see him and his opponent get thrown through glass, get tied up in barbed wire and even have staples shot into their chests. It’s barbaric stuff.

But the way that all of this is deconstructed is excellent. We see Randy’s injuries and then we see the sections of the match that caused them. You quickly begin to wonder how a human being can sustain this. And then when you realise that men do this night after night for nothing more than gas money, you begin to question your complicity in it. Yes I love wrestling – I love the silliness of it, the theatricality and, yes, the bloody violence – but the toll that it has on the human body is amazing. We’re basically paying to see men get slowly crippled. Because even though wrestling matches are pre-determined, they’re still incredibly violent. I mean, a chair shot on the head is a chair shot on the head. And when you consider the fact that these men wrestle full schedules, you wonder how they manage to get through it.

The answer to that is they use drugs. And in one scene we see Randy buy a whole cocktail of what the Iron Sheik would call medicine. It’s nice to see that the film doesn’t pussyfoot around the ugly side of the business.

Unfortunately, though, the film has some hokey melodrama at the centre of the plot. You see, Randy, after the hardcore match, has a heart attack and is ordered not to wrestle. If he wrestles again, he could have another heart attack and die. So that’s why he tries to make an honest living in the supermarket. But although something like this is actually a good possibility for a wrestler – far too many have died of heart disease because of all the drugs they take – it still feels like a contrived plot device. It feels like it’s trying too hard to add pathos.

For instance, at the end, we have Randy returning to the ring to fight a match. You’re asked to question whether he’s going to survive it. Is he going to drop down and die? But the film doesn’t need this. Because of his desire to get back in the ring and feed some more on the adulation of an adoring wrestling crowd, Randy squanders two real relationships. He squanders the chance to make up with his daughter and he loses the chance to have a meaningful relationship with Cassidy, the stripper he befriends. Randy prefers to live a life of make believe. He doesn’t really want a real relationship with all the confusion and heartache that comes with it. He wants the simple, illusory relationship he has with his audience. He hits a move and they cheer. It’s joyously uncomplicated – for him, it makes sense.

So therefore, knowing that he’s fucked up his life by being such a knuckle-head, we don’t really need the added melodrama of ‘will he live or will he die?’ But regardless, the film gives it to us anyway. And it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t resolve the issue. The film ends with Randy struggling to the top rope so that he can hit his finishing move. It’s most definitely curtains for him (if he doesn’t die, he’s probably never going to be able to wrestle again), but because the set-up is a little hackneyed, it’s not as moving as it should have been. The ending would have had more weight if this was simply a man unable to relinquish a past life with the hopes of a meaningful future shattered. But instead the film has a kind of soap opera ending. And although, yes, wrestling is soap opera, the real lives behind them are far more strange and bewildering.

I also wasn’t particularly taken with the scenes with Randy’s daughter. Evan Rachel Wood was a little bland and everything felt a little overly familiar. But thankfully you have Mickey Rourke to pull you through these scenes. He’s marvellous in the film. His Randy ‘The Ram’ is a pathetic, loveable, frustrating waster. As he says, he’s an old piece of meat. All he can do, much like the stripper he befriends, is sell his body to an eager public. He doesn’t know anything else. And rather miserably, he loves the people that are destroying him. The relationship with the crowd becomes almost sado-masochistic – as he prepares to perhaps dive to his death, he tearfully relishes the cheers. It’s a wonderfully bleak portrait of a man crashing and burning, and Rourke gives it the humanity it needs.

After the dizzying heights of Zodiac, David Fincher comes crashing back to earth with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here’s a film with a marvellous premise – a man being born old and gradually growing younger – that never takes flight. It’s a bafflingly empty experience.

The key problem is the passivity of the main character. Do we ever get to know him? Do we ever get inside his head? No we don’t. And there’s such scope for human emotion. Here’s a man who’s unlike any other. Here’s a man destined to become more youthful and beautiful as those around him decay and wither. But we never get any sense of sadness, or confusion, or anger. Benjamin Button never asks ‘why me?’ He just glides through life, seemingly all too happy to have been thrown this curveball.

But just think of what could have been done with this character. Denied youth for almost 60 years, and forced to become humble before his time, he could have given into brashness and arrogance later in life. Instead he just sleeps with a couple of women (or three). Or he could have even suffered the ignominy of having a youthful body but an old mind. He could have suffered the onset of dementia while looking like James Dean. But no, as a young man (even though he’s apparently old inside) he seems to have a young mind, too. So therefore I didn’t feel anything for him because he didn’t seem to feel anything himself. The only time the character seems to have some real sense of self-awareness is when he leaves his beloved Daisy because she’s pregnant and he doesn’t want her to have to bring up two children. But this is done is a completely half-assed manner. They have a stilted conversation and he goes. Instead of coming over as a doomed individual, he just seems flaky, and where’s the tragedy in that?

The only time I really felt anything for Benjamin was when he becomes a child and he can’t remember anything. At one point he sits on the roof and thinks he can fly. To have lived a full life and to lose all those memories to the passage of time is truly sad, but the film just suddenly comes to this. There’s no progression. You never get the feeling that things are slipping away from Button. One minute he’s a beautiful teenager with his memory and character intact, and the next he’s a helpless child. I wanted to feel time slipping away from him. I wanted to feel the terror that he’d feel, knowing that he was shrinking into himself. But instead the ending kind of feels like an afterthought. It’s there to tie everything up.

Despite this, at the end, you have the film’s most beautiful and heartbreaking image – a long shot of two old lovers walking down the street, but one of those people is an elderly lady and the other is a child. It has a strangeness that makes it striking and touching – the devotion of Daisy to see things through to the end finally makes you feel something for these people.

Unfortunately, though, there’s no chemistry between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Therefore most of the film is a dead loss. How are you supposed to invest in characters when the passion between them is non-existent?

And Fincher’s idea of romance is more than a little adolescent. What do Benjamin and Daisy do when they finally become an item? Why they go sailing into the sunset on a beautiful yacht, of course. Pur-lease. I’d expect this from someone like Richard Curtis, not the man who made Zodiac and Seven.

And the scene where a teenage Benjamin turns up to woo an elderly Daisy one last time just doesn’t work. It’s meant to be the emotional highlight, but it’s just a little weird. And it’s weird because the teenage Button seems to have completely black, lifeless eyes. It really put me off. And it also doesn’t work because it all feels more than a little cold. This is meant to be their last hurrah, but it feels like either of them could take it or leave it. I never got the feeling that this was some great romance.

You also have to get over the fact that the two characters first meet when one looks very old and when one looks very young. Does this ever enter their minds? Does Daisy fantasise about the wrinkly old man and does Benjamin fantasise about the perky, little girl? Who knows…

Another relationship that doesn’t work is the one between Benjamin and his father. You see, Benjamin’s father is dismayed when he sees that his son is ugly as sin. Therefore he goes through town and dumps him on the steps of an old person’s home. You’d think this abandonment might piss Benjamin off. But it doesn’t really. When he finally finds out who his father is he seems nonplussed. He doesn’t really go searching for answers to who he is – he just politely listens. This crushing passivity suffocates drama at every turn.

The only really enjoyable element of the film is the visuals. The film is gorgeous to look at. In particular, I love the first scene where Thomas Button runs through town as fireworks burst in the air (it’s the end of the Great War). The photography is gorgeous and the period detail is impeccable. But pretty early on you realise this is all the film has to offer – a beautiful exterior without a heart. Honestly, I ended up using the film as a kind of clothes catalogue. I’ve already noted that I should get a white t-shirt and leather jacket (although I guess I’ll do without the Triumph motorcycle). But aside from that, I got nothing from this movie.

And it’s quite sad when the trailer for the film is so much better than the film itself. Just watch the first teaser. It literally shows the whole film from beginning to end, only minus the lifeless filler in-between. It got me really excited for this film – it looked like it had something magical to offer. But along the way someone forgot that a film doesn’t exist on beautiful visuals alone – you need a human drama to anchor it, something that is sorely lacking here.

I Am Legend is one of those annoying ‘might have been’ films. It could have been great, but instead, because of either studio pressure or poor decisions made by the production, it falls short of its potential – the first part of the film is magnificent, but it falls apart towards the end.

I can put my finger on the bit where the film begins to nosedive. It’s great up until Robert Neville (Will Smith) has to kill his dog. Up until this point, the film is tense and tightly directed. But after the dog’s death, we’re introduced to another couple of survivors and we have to suffer some last minute attempts to find some ‘meaning’ behind the movie. Talk of god is introduced and the lean survival movie kind of gives way to blindingly obvious talk about tolerance and love.

We also have the female survivor say that god must have spared Neville, to which Neville rightly berates her, pointing out the fact that billions of people have died – the very idea that there might have been a ‘plan’ for this reflects badly on everyone. It demeans the plight of the survivors and says only bad things about the ‘creator’ that would have set this disaster in motion.

The end also suffers because we’re confronted with the appalling CGI for the infected people (or the ‘dark seekers’ as they’re called) – at the beginning we only get glimpses. Quite why they didn’t use people with make up, I don’t know. They surely would have looked better. But no, in a desperate attempt to create lots of kewl action, the filmmakers decided to make the enemy poorly rendered CG creations. Yes, freed from the constraints of live performers, you can have your bad guys climb walls and headbutt the pavement, but what’s the point when they never look real? Every time you see the dark seekers you’re taken out of the film. When they climb they look weightless, when they scream they look like a cartoon and all the other times there’s just an air of unreality. Just get real actors and cut back on the crazy shit. I’m sure people won’t spontaneously fall asleep if the bad guys aren’t constantly climbing lampposts like monkeys. There are other ways of making them threatening. You know, a bit of subtlety can work a charm.

The film also suffers from its tendency to indulge in cheap shots. There’s a bit where Robert Neville captures one of the dark seekers and tries to cure her of her disease. You’re just counting down the moments until she sits up and lets off a piercing scream, and like clockwork, she does. Then there’s the bit where Neville and his family, during a flashback, are escaping Manhattan when the outbreak first occurs. With the way it’s filmed, and with news of the crisis developing, you’re just waiting for the moment when an infected person slams against the car. And sure enough, they do. I surely can’t be the only one praying for some chills rather than laboured attempt at thrills.

But to be fair to the film, there are some nice creepy moments. An excellent example occurs when Neville’s dog is chasing a deer. The startled deer runs into a dark building and suddenly Neville has to possibly confront the dark seekers. He wants to turn back, knowing that they’re probably in the building, but he doesn’t want to leave his dog behind. So he has to wander the dark rooms with only a torch on the end of the gun to shine some light. It’s a very tense sequence, and it’s well constructed. And there’s an excellent moment when Neville shines his light into a room and we get a brief glimpse of lots of dark seekers huddled around in a circle, feeding. It’s a very creepy shot. And then the jump moment that soon follows once Neville finds his dog is actually well timed – unlike the other attempts to get a reaction, it’s not laboured.

Another favourite scene is when Neville is driving the streets and sees a mannequin in the middle of the road. You see, Neville, in order to still have some sort of human connection, talks to some mannequins in a video store. So to suddenly see one of them in the street is disconcerting to say the least. And Neville ends up losing the plot and shoots ‘Fred’ (the name he gave the inanimate object). He then begins to think he’s being watched and shoots at the windows. I wish that there was more of this. I wish that there was more of this confusion. But then Neville gets caught up in a trap and dangles from a rope and we quickly find out that this trap has been set by the dark seekers. The hunter has become the hunted.

But this scene kind of proves that Neville is wrong when he asserts that the dark seekers are no longer human. They’re still able to set up a trap for him and one of them even briefly braves the sunlight in order to voice his displeasure at Neville capturing one of his kind. Neville puts this down to hunger and social de-evolution, but maybe the guy is just pissed off that Neville bundled his girl into a sack. The alternative ending certainly suggests this. So for once we have a massive Hollywood blockbuster where the hero isn’t right all the time, which is pleasing indeed.

It also pleases me that a big action film like this can have a left of centre scene where the hero shyly eyes a female mannequin. It could be queasy in the extreme, but Smith manages to make it seem kind of sweet. His hero is pleasing mixture of incredible self-certainty and extreme vulnerability. I mean, if your family had been killed in a helicopter crash and you’d seen people get fed on by dark seekers and if you’d been in New York on your own for years, how long would it be before you started flirting with mannequins? I don’t think it would take long.

And Smith manages to put a lump in your throat when he has to kill his dog. And in the scenes that immediately follow. He says hello to the mannequin in the most pathetic way possible and then begs her to say hello to him, now that he’s all alone in the world. He just wants to hear a human voice speak to him. Smith is marvellous in the scene.

But unfortunately this high point signals the moment when Neville gets his wish and the film takes a turn for the worse. Smith begs for some human contact and then has to content himself with someone who doesn’t know who Bob Marley is. Be careful what you wish for.

Oh, and don’t think I didn’t notice the fact that Emma Thompson was responsible for this virus. Damn Limeys. They’ll destroy us all!