For all intents and purposes, Dressed to Kill is a remake of Psycho. Both films have a lusty female lead who gets horribly murdered at the end of the first act. Both films have a killer who has conflicting personalities. Both films have men dressing up as women. And both films are obsessed with showers.

However, the quality of the films are vastly different. For the most part, besides the final dialogue with the doctor and the bland lead characters, Psycho is a masterpiece. Dressed to Kill, on the other hand, is not. It’s silly, trashy and very hard to take seriously. It’s great fun, but sometimes in spite of itself.

Another way that Dressed to Kill differs from Psycho is that Psycho has an amazing beginning but then kind of runs out of steam towards the end. Dressed to Kill, though, has an atrocious first act but then picks up once our heroine is murdered.

It’s kind of hard to put into words just how terrible the first 30-40 minutes are. I haven’t cackled so much at a movie in a long time.

The film opens with Angie Dickinson having a long, steamy, luxurious shower while watching her husband shave. The sheer rugged masculinity of this old geezer scraping hairs off his face with a kickass macho cut throat razor turns her on. She can’t help but fondle herself with a bar of soap as we’re shown many close-ups of her tits. It’s filmed in the same kind of soft-focus nonsense way that De Palma films the shower scene in Carrie. Like that scene, everything is achingly romantic as bullshit twinkly music plays.

The twist in the Carrie shower scene is that Carrie gets her period. The twist here is that a second man appears from within the steam to rape Angie. Is it a nightmare? Or is it a fantasy? We immediately cut to Angie having unsatisying sex with her husband. Once he comes, he gives her the most hilarious, patronising, ‘You did a good job’ slap in the face. No wonder she wants sexy steam guy to rape her.

The sequence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is much lauded in certain critical circles, but I find it profoundly silly. It may have all the typical De Palma elements - long takes, split screens, lack of dialogue, great visuals - but the actual story that it tells is laughable.

Angie hangs out in the museum, watching the world go by, when she notices a guy taking an interest in her. He looks like complete Eurotrash (although we later find out that he has a very American name). He’s got huge sunglasses, jet black hair that looks like it’s been sandblasted on his head and he has a habit of thoughtfully sucking on his pen. He looks like he should be selling turtlenecks on the Cote d’Azur. Roger Moore would be envious of him.

Angie and the man give each other eyes and then eventually he sits down next to her, sucking on his pen like he’s oh so thoughtfully contemplating the artwork and totally not inviting her to suck on something else. They sit there for a while like a pair of idiots until she removes her glove, accidentally revealing a huge ring. In a hilarious moment, like Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville turning their backs on Kelly Cates, he gets up and runs off. Much nonsense follows. Where’s the guy? Where’s my glove? The guy has my glove and has terrified me with it! I must run off! Oh, now I’m outside and only have one glove. I must throw it on the floor and litter! Oh, now the guy is in a taxi outside the Met and is beckoning me by waving the other glove out of the window! Yeah, that’s totally not creepy and disrespectful. I’ll totally get into the cab with him.

Once they’re in the cab, they begin making out. And before you know it, in almost a magic trick, the man has Angie’s panties off and is going down on her. The music in the scene is hilarious. It’s very sweet and romantic, because, you know, there’s nothing more romantic than getting on the floor of a dirty, disgusting New York taxi and having someone perform oral sex on you; a complete stranger who beckoned you like you were a dog or a cat. And also having a slobbering cabbie watch it.

The next scene is my favourite. After an afternoon of rigorous, Olympic-level sex, Angie decides to sneak out of bed and back to her husband. She thinks for a moment, and in split screen, remembers her panties falling to the floor. No shit, we have a split screen of her smiling and her knickers falling off. She then decides to write a note to her one night stand, saying how much she enjoyed herself. She goes through a couple of drafts and then decides to look at something in the man’s desk drawer. She comes upon a medical report. For a moment, you think that the man might be crazy. That he’s a lunatic killer. But the reveal is so, so much better. The letter says that the man has venereal disease. By this point I was beyond myself. I was laughing like a maniac. You see what happens when you have the audacity to sleep with someone else? You see what happens when you betray your poor, condescending, selfish husband? You get the clap. As Sully in Commando would say, ‘You fuckin’ whore.’

Angie rushes away from her diseased lover but then realises that she’s forgotten her wedding ring. This is after she suffers a withering, dirty look from a small child in an elevator. The child obviously knows that she’s in the presence of a clap-ridden trollop. So Angie presses the elevator button about a million times before going back up to the man’s apartment. But before she can get there, she gets slashed up by a burly woman with a cut-throat razor. You know, because she’s a fucking whore and this is the price of a good time.

The killing, as per usual for De Palma, is a bloodbath. And then in a direct reference to Psycho, we have a shot of a blood-stained Angie Dickinson reaching out as the elevator doors open. It’s exactly the same as Janet Leigh reaching for the shower curtain.

Normally this sort of sequence should bring out the best of De Palma, but the musical score is terrible (I can’t fully explain just how horrible it is) and the reactions from the characters are unintentionally hilarious. Karen Allen’s escort girl witnesses the aftermath of the killing but then a hysterical woman sees Allen holding the weapon and screams like a banshee, thinking she’s the killer. The timing, the acting and the staging are ridiculous.

Once Angie Dickinson is killed, the film improves somewhat. Much like the vastly superior Blow Out, it develops elements of technological, surveillance thriller. Angie’s tech savvy teenage son becomes involved in the case and begins eavesdropping on cops and staking out Michael Caine’s shrink character. All of this stuff is great.

There’s also a fantastic sequence on the New York Subway. But even this is peppered with nonsense. Nancy Allen inadvertently gains the attention of a group of black men who immediately begin intimidating her. They say charming things like, ‘I’m gonna break her fucking ass.’ They’ve obviously become violently aroused at the sight of this prostitute and stalk her like a pack of wild animals. It’s the most cliched depiction of street thugs you’re likely to see. And the scene is made even more strangely amusing by the sight of a terrified Nancy Allen being stalked from one side of the train by a group of angry black men and by being stalked on the other side by a murderous transsexual.

Despite the dubious stereotypes, the scene has a lot of tension and there’s some fantastic deep focus photography. At one point we see Nancy Allen talking to a belligerent cop while the murderer sneaks onto the subway car in the background. And earlier on in the scene there’s a wonderful shot where both the murderer and Nancy Allen turn their head at the same time, both of them a distance apart but both of them perfectly in focus.

There’s a ridiculous but enjoyable scene where Nancy Allen comes onto Michael Caine’s shrink character. She needs info on one of his patients so she plans to seduce him so that she can get a look in his appointment book. It’s incredibly silly, what with the very conceit of the scene and the fact that it’s filmed with lightning and thunder (there’s a conflict within Caine...in his pants!). But despite how hokey it is, it works. And then we get the reveal that the murderer is...Michael Caine dressed as a woman!

Again, like Psycho, we have a terrible scene where a doctor conveniently explains everything that has been going on. Apparently Caine’s character has been looking to transition into becoming a woman. But inside Caine’s body there was a fight between the two sexes (!!). The female part didn’t want the masculine part to become dominant, so whenever Caine got aroused by a woman, the female side would come out and kill whoever gave him a boner.

Okay then...

But even though in the current climate that idea sounds offensive, the film is so silly and over the top that it’s hard to take offence. This film isn’t about sexuality or transsexuals. It’s about cinema. It’s a movie about movies. It’s a blatant attempt to remake Psycho and dress it up in different clothes. It’s not a disaster but it’s also not a success. There’s a lot to appreciate in the filmmaking craft and the visual storytelling, but the screenplay is appalling; lots of it is laughable. It even has the really annoying fake out ending, where it seems that the lead character has been brutally murdered but it turns out to be a paranoid dream. Thankfully lots of these ideas would coalesce into the much superior Blow Out.

Christopher Nolan is riding the crest of a wave. Revered in indie circles for Memento and adored by the masses for The Dark Knight, he’s quickly becoming a superstar director. Needless to say, people were literally wetting themselves at the prospect of his latest film, Inception. Complete with flying actors, trains rolling down streets and a booming soundtrack, the trailer was a sight to behold. Had I been a little less jaded and wankerish, I might have wet myself too.

Sadly these stunning visuals are the best thing about the film. The story is bogged down with mind-numbing exposition and the emotional arc is melodramatic to say the least.

Loosely resembling both a James Bond film and The Matrix, Inception concerns a group of thieves who travel into people’s dreams in order to extract valuable information. But an important Japanese businessman called Saito (Ken Watanabe) asks them to do much more than this. He doesn’t just want Leonardo DiCaprio’s merry gang to steal information; he wants them to go into someone’s mind and plant an idea – an operation called inception.

The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). He’s the heir to a lucrative energy monopoly and Saito wants DiCaprio’s gang to plant the idea that Fischer, upon his father’s death, should break it up. The rationale is that the energy monopoly is bad for everyone but the reality is that Saito doesn’t want to go out of business and would like the opportunity to take over.

Reading the basic premise, the film sounds interesting, but the reality doesn’t necessarily synch with the concept. Most of the problem with the film is that Nolan is incapable of setting up the world in an interesting way. It’s kind of the antithesis of The Matrix where everything was done with ease (too bad they fucked up royally with the sequels). All the talk of dreams within dreams and kicks and totems and projections feel remarkably laboured and clunky. The film can honestly be split into two halves – it’s awesome when people aren’t speaking but it’s a drag when they are.

One of the main offending scenes is when DiCaprio is showing Ellen Page’s character the dream world. Again I feel compelled to draw comparisons with the Wachowskis’ film. When Morpheus is showing Neo around the matrix, everything is presented simply and clearly – you get the idea instantly. With Inception, though, it feels awkward and ill-conceived. A good film doesn’t have to waste lots of time on endless exposition. Everything should unfold simply and clearly. This never happens with Nolan’s film.

I get particularly annoyed when films seem to be making things up as they go along. It’s a cheap way of getting around problems with the narrative and it’s a way of papering over cracks. This feeling of things being made up as they go along is particularly apparent in Inception. First of all you have the idea that individuals can go into other people’s dreams – fair enough, this is a cool idea. Then you find out that you can have dreams within dreams and then equally out of nowhere we find out that if you go really deep into someone’s dreams you can go to limbo. All of these concepts are fine but the construction of the story is lacklustre; you never feel that the filmmakers have a firm grasp of the rules of this world. You feel like they’ll bend and change them to serve themselves rather than the story.

Another lacklustre aspect of Inception is the emotional arc. DiCaprio and his wife fool around with this dream world and end up in limbo. DiCaprio eventually ends up discovering that he’s living a dream but his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) won’t accept it. In order to get them to return to reality, DiCaprio performs inception and plants the idea in Mal’s head that she’s not living in the real world: by killing themselves while in limbo, they’ll return to reality. The only problem is that DiCaprio’s idea has stuck and the awoken Mal refuses to believe the reality of her existence. Again, writing this down, it sounds like an interesting idea, but once again the execution is lacking.

One key problem is the lack of chemistry between Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard. They never feel like a convincing couple. But more damning than this is the ludicrous melodrama that forms the basis of many of their scenes. I was particularly amused by Mal’s idea for her and her husband to commit suicide together. She goes to all the effort of booking hotel rooms that face one another. This way she and her hubby can jump out of the window at the same time in glorious synchronised suicide. But it just seems like such a convoluted way of doing it. You have to find a hotel that has facing rooms and which both look down into a vertiginous drop. Why not just buy a gun or sit in a bathtub and drop a toaster into the water? I guess those options just aren’t romantic enough…

I also had to laugh when DiCaprio visited his dream world and we got to see what he has locked in the basement. Again it’s the hotel room where his wife killed herself and sure enough Mal is down there. But while the beginning of the scene is very well done (it has a creepy Shining vibe), it’s spoiled by melodrama. Mal goes crazy and then DiCaprio escapes into an elevator and keeps his wife locked down below. Yes I understand the symbolism but the execution of the scene is lacking and had me giggling like a girl. Yeah, keep your wo-man locked in the basement where she belongs!

Another laugh came when Leonardo DiCaprio gets stuck in the gap between buildings while trying to escape some bad guys. Yes this is the kind of thing that often happens in dreams (although the sequence is meant to take place in reality) but I couldn’t help but feel it was a jab at DiCaprio’s puffy physique. Got wedged between some buildings, you fat bastard!

Okay, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time bitching about the film but it certainly does have lots of things going for it. The action is often amazing and the visuals are stunning too. One of my favourite visuals is that of a train rampaging through some city streets. It’s an unusual juxtaposition but it’s filmed in such a matter of fact way that it’s only after a few seconds that you realise that a huge train should not be in this environment.

I also love some of the imagery in the opening sequence – especially the water bursting through the walls. And it’s also quite amazing how much the opening few minutes feel like a James Bond movie. For some reason I couldn’t help but think it felt like a modern You Only Live Twice. And speaking of James Bond, the snow sequence near the end of the movie has a huge Bond vibe. However, this sequence is less effective – by this point I was getting serious action fatigue.

The best scene, though, is the zero gravity fight. It wipes the floor with anything that The Matrix could come up with and I was constantly asking myself how they filmed it. It’s an amazing sequence.

Something else that I liked was how immoral the story is. Cillian Murphy’s character is being conned into breaking up his company, so therefore the heroes are behaving like massive pricks. Saito might pretend that this mission is to help everyone and break up a monopoly but its aim is to really set up another one.

But in the end, these pluses aren’t anywhere near enough to convince me that the film is some kind of modern masterpiece. The film is flawed as fuck. Hell, I think I might even prefer Insomnia...

The Dark Knight is an improvement on Batman Begins, but it’s not the giant leap that people would have you believe. It has too many flaws. The final sequence, for example, is a gigantic mess. Every attempt is made to ensure that it’s exciting, but the editing is all over the place and its not even clear what’s going on.

Then there’s Two-Face. What a horribly tedious creation he is. Basically his girlfriend gets killed and he goes a bit nuts and then he goes on a killing spree. Sounds kind of interesting, doesn’t it? It’s not. The stuff with Harvey Dent previous to this is enjoyable, but Two-Face himself sucks the life out of the movie. And that’s probably because it’s over too quickly. All Two-Face gets to do is whine, toss his little coin and then fall out of a building. It’s over in a flash and you’re left wondering why create this villain at all if you’re going to do so little with him.

And the make-up and CGI for his disfigured face is abysmal. The film goes to such lengths to create a realistic environment for these fantastical characters that the cartoony effects stick out like a sore thumb. I can remember reading somewhere that Nolan thought that a realistically scarred face would look too horrific, but he could have at least gone for something that didn’t look like it was on an anatomy page in Encarta. It's thoroughly distracting and completely out of place. Whenever he appeared I could only think 'Crap CGI. Crap CGI.' And I'm not quite sure why Nolan suddenly got squeamish about having realistic effects. So we can have a mobile phone stitched into a man's body and have it explode, and we can have people tortured, but he thinks that some realistic scarring would be too horrific? It's by far the biggest misstep.

A smaller distraction was Batman’s cowl. It has a very weird shape, like Bale’s head is the teat on the end of a condom, albeit it a black condom with bat ears. It’s nowhere near as good as Keaton’s costume in Batman Returns.

And like Keaton, Bale does that strange voice thing where it sounds like he’s been chugging gravel. But unlike some people, this didn’t distract me. How else is Batman supposed to talk? Is he supposed to talk in his normal Bruce Wayne voice? That would be awfully intimidating, wouldn’t it? And it would be a great way of hiding his identity. But although I find the Batman voice perfectly logical, there was once or twice where Bale suddenly started lisping. In these instances he became rather camp.

It’s mind-numbingly predictable to point to Heath Ledger’s performance as the highlight, but it’s most certainly true. His Joker makes Nicholson’s look like a slightly eccentric, rather cuddly uncle. Ledger blows him out of the water. The best thing about Ledger’s Joker is that there’s no reasoning with him. He just wants to play his games and have fun. However, he has a very strange sense of fun. Fun for him is playing with the Batman and turning Gotham’s citizens into criminals. He’s a guy that gets nothing out of money. Therefore it’s impossible to squeeze him.

The only problem with this is that it weakens Batman’s character. You go through the whole of Batman Begins to establish how strong he is and suddenly you castrate him. In this film he’s remarkably impotent. And I should also point out that the Joker is smart to a ridiculous degree. His plans are incredibly complicated and they all go off like clockwork.

But that being said, the character is still enormous fun. One of my favourite Joker moments has to be the pencil trick. And what about poor Brian the fake Batman? Not only does he get to star in his own video, but he also gets to smash into the Mayor’s window. Nice. But there’s also the bit where the Joker turns up as a nurse. I loved the smile he gave Two-Face. And I like the fact that Nolan makes the Joker reprehensible enough to blow up a hospital.

But this is child’s play compared to the Joker’s plan to blow up Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes at the same time. He makes Batman choose which one to save and then Commissioner Gordon goes after the other one. Naturally, Batman goes after his old squeeze Rachel, but the Joker plays a trick on him and the location he’s given is Dent’s. So therefore just before Rachel dies she gets to hear that her beloved Bruce Wayne has ‘chosen’ to save Dent and that he’s forsaken her, making her last few moments on the planet extra miserable. And Dent gets to hear his love’s final few moments and gets to feel the guilt of being saved. You’ve got to admire how wonderfully twisted the Joker is and how easily he has everyone wrapped around his little finger.

But it’s also the small moments that make Ledger’s performance great. I like it when he arrives at Bruce Wayne’s party, looking for Harvey Dent. He begins interrogating the guests and grabs a bald guy by the head, asking him if he’s seen the DA. The guy doesn’t respond and the Joker widens his eyes and goes, ‘No.’ It’s a great bit of acting. And I also loved it when he sarcastically applauds Gordon’s promotion.

The rest of the cast don’t get to have anywhere near as much fun, but they all do a good job. Bale is solid as always, as is Caine, Freeman and Oldman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is a massive improvement over Katie Holmes. But better than all of these is Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent. He’s cocky but believably decent as the incorruptible DA, and like Bruce Wayne you’re seduced by him. But while you feel that the film is building up to something special with his tragedy as Two-Face, it never happens. Suddenly the script lets Eckhart down and his fall provides zero emotion. There’s just not enough time invested in it. Plus all he goes on about is Rachel. 'My Rachel!' 'My Rachel!' Shut the fuck up.

Fortunately, though, there are many wonderful distractions to ensure that you don’t dwell too hard on this disappointment. The action, for instance, is superb. And once again Nolan excels with a wonderful car chase. The sequence where the Joker is trying to get his hands on Dent is marvelous. With its use of a juggernaut and other heavy vehicles, it reminded me of the chase at the end of T2. And I really dug the Batpod. And then there’s the opening bank heist. Nolan has said that he was inspired by Heat and it really does capture the same sort of feeling. It’s not quite as epic, but it’s a fantastic bit of cinema. Everything from the amazing stunt that opens the film to the school bus crashing through the bank works a treat.

However, my favourite bit in the whole film is a very small moment. Right after the Joker escapes from police custody we briefly see him hanging his body out of a squad car. There’s no sound and the music is no more than a hum, but it’s incredibly cinematic and says more about the character than almost anything else could. This is what makes the Joker’s life worth living; running rings around other people and playing games with them.

And Nolan must also be commended for some of the film’s subtext. The Joker’s videos kind of resemble the sorts of things Al Qaeda would make and the whole film asks how far would you go to try and re-establish control. Do you destroy everything you believe in just so that things can be the way they used to be? Of course this is the crisis that America faces where civil liberties are eroded in order to try and make the country ‘safer’. The Dark Knight just takes it to an extreme.

So while Nolan must be commended for the ambition of the project and for most of the film’s execution, it’s by no means the instant masterpiece it’s been touted as. Yes it’s the best Batman film that’s been made, but it’s not even close to being the best film of all time (IMDb Top 250 rot in hell).

Fear gets mentioned quite a few times in Batman Begins. In fact, it gets mentioned about a hundred times. 'I seek the means to fight injustice. To turn fear on those who prey on the fearful.' 'Now you must journey inwards, to what you really fear.' 'There is nothing to fear but fear itself.' Etc. Etc. And then the whole of Gotham gets The Fear and tries to rip itself apart. It's almost as if the filmmakers are trying to say something. Is it a comment on paranoia in the Bush era? Or is it an insight into how ordinary people are running scared from real and imagined criminality? Or then again, is it just a bunch of cool stuff in a big Hollywood blockbuster? It's probably a combination of all three, although, as you'd expect, the cool stuff takes precedence.

And it’s certainly cool to see Batman back on the big screen after he was gang raped into a coma by Joel Schumacher and everyone else who was involved in the last two pieces of shit. You can’t keep a good money-spinning cash cow down for long.

But you have to wait a while for Batman to make an appearance – unlike Burton’s film where his presence is immediate. Therefore you have to endure the dreaded back story, which is quite often the death of many a comic book film. I mean, the origin story is often like the first couple of hundred pages of a biography. Yeah, I don’t give a shit that Barry Big Bollocks was born into poverty and that he had to take coal sandwiches to school. I want to read the bit where he makes it big and fucks some slut with a mud shark. And so with a comic book character you often just want to see them in action.

But the build-up in Batman Begins is well handled, even though the ninja training is a tad dull. Yeah I know we have to see how Bruce Wayne gets his skills, but still, it’s rather ho-hum. Neeson’s mentor comes across as a bland, slightly malevolent Apollo Creed or a less interesting variation of the old git out of The Karate Kid. Thrilling cinema it isn’t.

However, other stuff in the build-up is superb, especially the scenes dealing with Bruce’s childhood. They have real heart and feeling, which reminds you that this isn’t some bland product churned out by some easily intimidated hack, but a film made by someone who genuinely cares about the characters.

At the same time, though, you have to marvel at how gosh darn great Bruce’s dad is. Like a superhero he saves Bruce when he falls down a hole. Then he carries Bruce to his bedroom and takes care of him. Then he provides Gotham City with a cheap public transport system. What a wonderful guy. No wonder, then, that his death would fuck Bruce up to such an extent that he dresses up like a giant bat.

The appearance of Batman himself is wonderful. Some hoods are conducting a drug deal down at the docks and then suddenly they begin getting picked off one by one. It’s like something out of a horror film. And then our first full glimpse of the Bat Man sees him dangling upside down behind a criminal. It’s a joy to finally see Batman trying to scare thugs rather than give them hard-ons by flashing bat butts and bat nipples.

And Bale has the perfect voice to intimidate people with. His Batman growls and screams. There’s no messing around. In particular I like the scene where he drags a bent cop up by his ankles and then interrogates him. One second you’re having a nice snack and the next you’re upside down being screamed at by a giant bat. I think anyone would be well within their rights to shit themselves.

And it’s also pleasing that the film is quite scary for a mainstream blockbuster. A large part of the story revolves around a hallucinogenic drug that makes people freak out. Cue then lots of cool visuals of people seeing scary stuff. My favourite is probably the satanic Batman that people see flying over the city. But the demon Batman that Dr Crane/Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) sees is really cool as well. Oh, and I also like the Scarecrow’s horse – it has glowing red eyes and breathes fire.

As far as the villains go, Dr Crane is easily the best. Excellently played by Cillian Murphy, he has a cold, slimy, sleazy vibe to him. He might not be physically threatening, but his eyes are as cold as ice. Therefore it’s a huge disappointment that he plays second fiddle to Liam Neeson’s colourless Ra’s Al Ghul. Honestly, when he returns, you kind of sigh. You just want to give him a drink to loosen him up. Maybe if he had a laugh he wouldn’t feel so compelled to destroy society and be such a pompous downer. At least you felt Crane enjoyed being evil. He even makes a Roger Moore-style quip when he sets Batman on fire: ‘You need to lighten up.’ Excellent.

And the whole League of Shadows thing is silly as hell. Apparently they’re a group of vigilantes that keep the world in check by destroying societies when they become too corrupt. According to them, they sacked Rome and burnt London to the ground. What the hell is this, The Da Vinci Code? Are they the Priory of Sion or something? For a film that tries to drag Batman back into a sense of reality, this stands out as pure silliness.

Something else that doesn’t really work is the casting of Katie Holmes. She doesn’t embarrass herself and she’s not annoying in a Vicki Vale type of way (although at least Kim Basigner and her acres of hair gave me confusing trouser rumblings as an innocent youth), but she’s ridiculously out of place as a DA. She has no authority. She has no screen presence. She’s amorphous.

Thank fuck then that the rest of the cast, Liam Neeson aside, is superb. Michael Caine is excellent as Alfred, Morgan Freeman does a good job as Q (er, I mean, Lucius Fox), Tom Wilkinson shines in the short amount of time he has and Gary Oldman does a decent job with the thankless role of Gordon – although for some reason the way he says ‘Kevlar’ at the end makes me laugh; just listen to the way he says it. And of course Christian Bale is excellent as Batman. He might not look as deranged as Michael Keaton, but he's far more convincing.

But Bale actually isn’t the best thing in the film. The best thing is the Tumbler. The car chase here is magnificent. The Batmobile flies over roofs, crashes through walls and blows shit up, yet it feels completely authentic. Quite a feat if you ask me. And it’s certainly one of the best action scenes in recent years. And it makes up for the rather bland fight scenes that pepper the film. They try and ape the ones in the Bourne movies but they’re even more blurry and hard to watch.

But even though I have reservations about certain things, the film isa massive success. The serious treatment of the characters has to be applauded and the film itself is engrossing and exciting. Here’s hoping the next one is even better.

There’s an unrelenting quality about Get Carter that is perfectly captured in the opening titles. In this sequence we see Jack Carter travelling on a train from London to Newcastle. From a distance we see him eat dinner and then in a toilet we see him take nose drops. It’s like he’s preparing for a business trip. But instead he’s making the long trip up North to his hometown so that he can find out who killed his brother. And with the visceral shots of trains whizzing past, it’s like Carter is a bullet. He’s going straight for the jugular. He’s not going to mess about. His mission is a simple one.

In one of the opening scenes, Carter arrives in a Newcastle pub. He asks for a pint of bitter and then after the barman goes to serve him, he clicks his fingers and orders that it be served in a thin glass. As if the flash clothes and accent didn’t set him apart from everyone else, this is a blunt message – Carter is different from these Northern muppets. He has nothing in common with them. He doesn’t like them and he doesn’t respect them. He’s moved up in the world. This place is no longer his home.

An even more blunt way of illustrating Carter’s distaste with his old home is when he tells his brother’s girlfriend that the only reason he returned to ‘this craphouse’ was to find out who was responsible, as Carter certainly doesn’t believe that his brother’s death was an accident. But even though the Newcastle that is shown here looks grim and unglamorous, it does have its own beauty. It’s bleak and it’s industrial, but it oozes character. The locale adds tons of atmosphere to the film. As do the people. There are loads of great little details. For instance there's the cabaret singer in a pub Carter goes to. Large of frame and not in the least bit physically attractive, she croons her way through a song while flirting with patrons and kissing one or two of them. But then at the end a woman leaps at her and they get into a fight. This Northern town is a million miles away from the London Carter is now used to. It's lack of style and taste amuses him.

And one of the best scenes illustrates the differences between the two towns. There's a scene where Carter is talking on the phone to his girlfriend (who's played by Britt Ekland). He asks her what she's wearing and they begin having phone sex. But Carter is doing this in the presence of the owner of the B & B he's staying at. We see her in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth in the foreground as Carter coolly tells his girlfriend what he'd like to do her. But while his girlfriend is slim, blonde and attractive, the landlady is reasonably large and significantly older. However, this doesn't stop Carter from having sex with her. He's worked himself up and the landlady is easily seduced by the sleazy glamour of this confident, cruel Londoner. He's nothing like the men she's used to, so she can't resist him, even though it's clear he's a colossal wanker.

The morning after is amusing as well. The landlady asks Carter if he wants breakfast. He tells her she must be joking, probably appalled at the idea of them acting like some married couple. But then just as they begin to have sex again, some of Carter's colleagues sneak into the house. They have orders to take him back to London. And we see them enter the bedroom with the camera filming from under the bed. Therefore we see their feet in the bottom of the frame as the bed shakes above. It's a funny moment. But the scene gets even better when Carter finally realises that he and the landlady aren't alone. He slides off the bed, reaches under and grabs a large shotgun. And then completely stark bollock naked he leads the interlopers out of the house. Wisecracks are made ('Put it away. I know you won't use it.' 'The gun he means.') and we even have a shot from between Jack's legs with his cock precipitously close to entering the frame, but the highlight of the comedy is when Jack walks the men out into the street. The next door neighbour is innocently coming out to get her milk and then she drops it in fright. Which gun makes her jaw drop? We never know for sure.

But although the film is consistently amusing, it's also consistently violent. Carter doesn't let anyone get in the way of his quest for revenge. But one of the many great things about the film is that his motivation isn't as simple as it seems. Yes he cares for his brother, as shown in the eerie moment when he touches his dead brother's hand as he lays in a coffin in the living room, but he's not that upset by it. Hell, after seeing a moment of tenderness with his brother, we see Carter casually shaving as he peers down on his deceased sibling. Consequently, this mission of his seems more like an act of duty. If you're a gangster like Carter is, you can't let anyone fuck with your family. The people responsible have to be taken out, even if you didn't get on well with your kin. And this seems to be the case with Jack. We find out that he was sleeping with his brother's wife.

And this adds another level of complexity, as Jack's brother has a daughter, a teenager called Doreen. But instead of being his brother's daughter, she may be Jack's. And there are some appropriately awkward scenes between Jack and his possible daughter. Jack asks her what she's doing. She tells him that she's working in Woolworths. He says that that must be very interesting. They have no connection whatsoever, but they're obliged to indulge in meaningless conversations because they're blood. And because they're blood, and because Doreen might be his girl, Jack is heartbroken when he discovers that she's starred in a porno movie. We see Jack watching the film alone, sitting on a bed with a projector noisily turning over. And then we briefly see a tear run down his cheek. It's one of the few glimpses we get of his humanity. But then the tears quickly turn to violence.

We later find out that the reason Carter's brother was killed was because he found out about the movie and was going to grass the makers up to the police. So as a result his brother was roughed up, fed lots of alcohol and stuck in a car to make the death look like an accident. So now Carter not only wants to kill the person or persons who killed his brother, but he wants to kill the people who made the movie, too.

One of the most sadistic scenes is when Carter catches up with the man who actually fucked his niece. The man begs for his life and tells Carter everything he knows, but then Jack produces a knife. The man then gets on his knees and says that he didn't kill his brother. 'I know you didn't kill him,' says Jack as he stabs him in the gut. Nobody is going to get off the hook.

Even worse than this, though, is when Jack kills local businessman Cliff Brumby. Brumby is the man who showed the porno film to Jack's brother. Carter repeatedly smashes him in the face and then eventually dumps him over the side of a high-rise building where the fat bastard lands on a car that has a mother and child inside. This film doesn't exist in some consequence-free movieland. But at the same time, as far as Jack is concerned, they're just collateral damage. He has blinkers on. Nothing is going to get in his way.

Another piece of collateral damage is the death of Glenda. He sleeps with her and then discovers the porno movie. Enraged at what he sees and that this woman is part of it, he stuffs her in the boot of her car. But then after driving to the docks he gets involved in a shoot-out with his London colleagues. You forget about the girl during the brief action sequence, but then as the bad guys are running off they shout from the other side of the water that Carter's car needs a wash. The car is then rammed into the water where it sinks without a trace with the girl still in the boot. Seeing this, Carter barely reacts. There's nothing he can do about it now, and besides, as far as he's concerned, he probably thinks she got what was coming to her.

But the most shocking piece of violence occurs when Jack kills Margaret. Margaret is a streetwalker that Carter's brother falls in love with. But she won't commit to him and she doubtlessly steers Doreen into the sleazy world of blue movies - Margaret is one of the stars of the movie Carter watches. And so Carter drives her into the woods and then as he circles her in the glare of the car's headlights, he forces her to undress at gunpoint. He then calmly and methodically gives her an overdose and dumps her in a lake. What gives the scene it's power, and the film as a whole for that matter, is how casually it's filmed. And when I say casual, I don't mean the film makes light of violence - it's always very grim and dirty and nasty and not the least bit sexy or glamorous. Instead it's filmed very simply and matter-of-factly. The film never goes for false emotions.

And so with the film being so stark and grim and relentlessly nasty, you'd think it would warrant little attention. But while Carter is a complete bastard, it's impossible not to be on his side or not to root for him. Yes he's a wanker but his revenge has a perverse air of nobility to it. After all, he kills the person who murdered his brother and kills the people who took advantage of his niece. Hell, he even brings down a vice racquet. So he's kind of like the white knight taken to an extreme.

The end of the film sees Carter kill his brother's murderer by pouring whiskey down his throat and then smashing him with the butt of his shotgun. But then after experiencing a brief moment of joy, he's taken out by a sniper. It's the perfect ending for the film. Carter has burnt all his bridges. He has nowhere to go. And so he's coldly and efficiently despatched. And at the end we see his body lying on the beach, waves lapping over him. During the film Carter tries to fight the tide, but you can only go so far before fate catches up with you. And the music at the end amplifies how hollow Carter's victory is. Yes he killed his brother's murderer, but the world is going to continue exactly as it had before.