Meet Dave
The recent leakage of the home-made sex tapes of Verne Troyer, who plays the diminutive version of the villain in the Austin Powers movies, has given a new word to the lexicon of penis slang — “Mini-Me”.
So what is one to make of the fact that, in his new film, Eddie Murphy plays a 3cm-high alien? He also plays the human-shaped spaceship controlled by such mini-aliens, which has to find convincing ways to interact with real humans while on a quest to save a distant planet.
This interaction provides much of the comic thrust of Meet Dave; that and Murphy’s ability to grin in a way that can only invoke Robert Nye’s immortal phrase: “a fox eating shit out of a wire brush”. Not quite as bad as expected, Meet Dave will make reasonable entertainment for anyone under the age of 10. — Shaun de Waal
WsZ
This serial-killer horror is a knockoff of the now seriously knackered Saw franchise. That title is supposedly a mathematical equation carved into the victims’ bodies. But it is never explained; I can only assume the producers think their target audience is so stupid it will subconsciously pick up on the fact that it looks like “SAW” in reverse.
Stellan Skarsgård and Melissa George play two New York cops who discover corpses of people who have been apparently tortured and killed in pairs. There is minor interest in that a crack whore is played in cameo by the estimable British actor Sally Hawkins. — Peter Bradshaw