text: Miscast, badly directed and atrociously written, this is watchable if you have an hour or two to kill or are suffering from insomnia, but only just. Robert Carlyle fully realises his potential as an actor of supreme mediocrity with only one expression to his repertoire (that of a chronically constipated football hooligan nursing a crippling inferiority complex), which he manages at times to alter slightly by flaring his nostrils and baring a row of skewed yellow teeth (this to indicate anger, tenderness, grief, surprise, horror, hilarity, compassion, etc.) In his role as "the best marine engineer in the UK" and son of a university professor he is about as convincing as my neighbour's cat. Tom Courtenay, equally miscast, slurring and mistiming every line, appears permanently soused to the eyeballs, and would seem no more able to tell a flood from a puddle of his own urine if he were standing in it. All in all, another silly attempt on the part of the British to imitate Hollywood pulp at its most rubbishy. The dialogue is a series of badly-delivered clichés; the action is disjointed; the plot is pointless and amputated; and the characters, if you can call them that, do not even make it into the basic two-dimensional sphere of their American counterparts.