Phil Hoad

The rangy and trenchant Eckhart does convincingly bring the ruckus in a way that suggests an ageing 007. But if that’s a promising sign for this new phase of his career, he can do better than this dour and charmless parade.

It’s both by the book and dispiritingly vague.

The cranked-up pitchside action is hilarious, like a live feed from inside Cristiano Ronaldo’s head as he replays his own goals reel. . . Translating football into the battle royale format only goes so far, though.

The visually overworked Dark Match feels oddly underworked at the same time.

There is little payoff, with Fickman running shy of the full-blooded commitment to make his film a proper weepie and instead constantly reverting to sassy, annoyingly self-aware comedy that makes light of everything.

It might work if Rita was a more appealing protagonist, capable of wringing out gallows humour or personal tragedy from her predicament.

Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.

There is a certain Cartesian buzz to be had from Sensation if you abandon all hope of following the plot, and let it wash over you. But that won’t help when it tries to land a final twist that is supposed to bend minds, but is more likely to exhaust patience.

The close-knit ethos might well explain the franchise’s gleefully perverse sense of fun, but the truth is this love-in features too much filler.

It doesn’t help that the film takes itself with Deliverance-like seriousness, and fails to really acknowledge its absurdity.

Like the drilling operation, this was a script in sore need of a clean-up operation.

Patric’s inscrutable performance recedes intriguingly while Elwes over-reaches, suggesting a man locked in internal combat.

Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.

Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.

Tradition of course demands that the pert teen sacrifices in such gore fodder be satisfyingly dislikable. It isn’t easy, though, to make stupidity interesting, and Shark Bait is always one-note in its exploitation of its characters.