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Based on a sequence of novels by Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising is the story of Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig), a young boy charged with saving the world from The Dark, an all-powerful evil force type thing. He's aided in his quest by the Old Ones, a gang of ageing character actors - sorry, immortals - who hang out in a suspiciously old-fashioned English village complete with red phone boxes and snow at Christmas.

The success of the Harry Potter and Rings franchises has opened the floodgates for fantasy movie adaptations. However, if this slapdash effort is anything to go by, goblin-lovers should barricade themselves in bookstores and prepare to repel greedy Hollywood execs with pitchforks. By ditching most of the Arthurian/pagan mythology of Susan Cooper's novels, and Americanising its young hero, The Dark Is Rising loses much of what makes the books interesting in the first place. What you're left with is a standard find-the-magical-items quest that takes forever to get going and then scoots through the action with barely a nod to suspense or even coherence. Will's quest for six magical "signs" feels as arbitrary as Sonic the Hedgehog collecting coins.

"TERRIBLE BODGE"

The script (by the normally reliable John Hodge) is a gnomic mishmash of doomy prophesies. We're told again and again that Will is "the seventh son of a seventh son" and only he can save the world from The Dark, personified here by Christopher Eccleston's completely unthreatening villain. We're never told why. Poor old Ian McShane, as Will's magical mentor, is stuck with reams of tin-eared dialogue that sounds like it came from a Games Workshop mail-order catalogue. It doesn't help that director David Cunnigham frequently shoots his action sequences skewed at an angle or even completely upside-down in a vain attempt to make them look more interesting. All in all, this is a terrible bodge.

The Dark Is Rising is out in the UK on 19th October 2007.