Jake Speed

The remarkable thing is that here is a movie that wants to be bad and still fails. There's nothing wrong with its fecund premise: a fictional comic-strip hero let loose on the screen to lampoon and parody himself through every thrills-and-spills adventure caper that has graced our cash-tills in recent years. But Crawford plays Speed with his foot in his mouth rather than tongue-in-cheek, and instead of glorying in the experiences of the pulp novel dialogue, dissipates all the comic potential by his evident bewilderment. The feckless and dupable Kopins is the sex interest, romanced down the Zambesi in the quest to rescue her abducted sister from an evil gang of white slave traders, led by almost cynically OTT gay nasty Hurt. In danger of making the targeted teen audience kick the cinema habit altogether.