The phrase “Hollywood remake” should strike fear into the heart of any discerning cinemagoer. The cast’s claim that this should be seen as homage rather than a remake did little to ease my fears — it’s only a couple of years since Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of Planet of the Apes, and the wounds have yet to heal.

The leading cast is strictly B-list — Mark Wahlberg, Seth Green, Jason Stratham and Charlize Theron — whose combined number of good films can be counted on one hand. There is a supporting role for the truly talented Edward Norton, but he only appeared in the film to fulfil a contractual agreement he made with Paramount before he hit the big time. The thought of Marky Mark Wahlberg trying to replicate Michael Caine’s performance in the original sent a shiver down my spine.

If they couldn’t make a remake of Get Carter work, with Stallone, who I’d take over Wahlberg any day of the week, in the lead then why should The Italian Job be any different?

However, thanks to a witty script, exhilarating action sequences and a sense of fun, The Italian Job is far better than it has any right to be.

The film is far from great, but it’s one hell of a ride.

The only Italian part of The Italian Job is Venice, where the film begins. We witness our heroes successfully and ingeniously steal $35 million in gold bullion. After a thrilling chase down Venice’s canals and celebratory drinks, one member of the crew, Edward Norton’s Steve, double-crosses the others, stealing the bullion and leaving them for dead.

Predictably (otherwise it would be a very short film indeed), the gang survive and hunt down Steve, who they discover is living surrounded by his wealth and tight security in Los Angeles. The gang then plan to take their gold back with the help of a traffic jam, and yes, three Mini Coopers.

The film takes many elements from the 1969 Michael Caine original: the heist of gold, the use of Minis and the mother of all traffic jams. However, there are enough differences to classify this as a homage — in the original there is no double-cross and the action actually takes place in Italy.

Our leading cast is amiable enough. Wahlberg wisely chooses not to imitate Caine’s performance going for understated sweetness rather than outright charisma. He leaves the comic relief to the rest of his crew. Stratham, who seems to have replaced Vinnie Jones as Hollywood’s British heavy of choice, can charm any woman into bed as Handsome Rob, an adjective that could be described as debatable at best. Green is a computer whiz who claims that Napster was stolen from him while he was taking a nap. His tales are as long as Theron’s legs.

Norton has the talent to have one of the great Hollywood careers. He was fantastic as a man living out his last day before a seven-year stretch in prison in this year’s little seen Spike Lee joint, 25th Hour. In Fight Club and American History X he has made two films that will stand the test of time. It’s clear The Italian Job wasn’t going to challenge him as an actor and his disdain for the role jumps from the screen.

In saying this, The Italian Job is a cut above most blockbusters. Perhaps because it is not trying to be anything great or profound. You could argue that it’s a heist by numbers — double crosses and car chases are not anything new. However, the characters have a lot of charm and the script has enough satisfying plot twists and humour to make it work.

The Italian Job also delivers on its action set pieces, which are really the core of the film. Their scope is large but they always seemed controlled. I’ve never been into cars all that much but watching the Mini Coopers buzzing about was truly thrilling, which is a testament to director F. Gary Grey.

This homage may not be as good as the original, but only the naive would expect it to be. But, It’s also not much worse — in fact younger viewers used to a lot of hi-octane action might prefer it.

And in a summer where big Hollywood films have disappointed, The Italian Job is a film that does the job very well.

Seriously, this job isn’t for the fainthearted.

Fox are coming off a good year, with X2 cleaning up at the box office on both sides of the Atlantic and the studio obviously hopes to repeat the trick with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or LXG, as it was dubbed in America where longer words are obviously frowned upon.

Starring Sean Connery as adventurer Allan Quartermain, the film is based on the cult comic by British writer Alan Moore and brings together an array of turn-of-the-century literary characters — including the Invisible Man and Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde — to combat an Empire-threatening menace.

Whether the film, which is released in the UK to coincide with the October school holidays — will do better over here than in the States, where it received mixed reviews, is uncertain but hopefully it will provide the thrills it promises.

For the less adolescently-minded, Sean’s fellow Scot Ewan McGregor stars opposite the increasingly smug-looking Renee Zelleweger in Down With Love, a battle of the sexes-comedy that takes its inspiration and entire look from the 50s and 60s.

The film’s trump card may be its co-star, David Hyde Pierce (Niles Crane from Frasier).

Fox are also hoping the return of gladiator-star Russell Crowe to our cinema screens will also do the business.

Although Master and Commander does give the impression it may just be Gladiator on boats, it also reunites Crowe with his co-star from A Beautiful Mind, Paul Bettany.

Behind the camera is Peter Weir who, from Picnic at Hanging Rock to The Truman Show, has proved himself to be wholly incapable of making a bad film, and should keep things moving along nicely.

Fox probably have Oscar hopes for Master and Commander and it certainly looks epic enough with amazing sets to complement the strong cast.

Fox are also taking us back to where no one can hear us scream with a dusted-down version of Alien receiving cinema release. Although the film boasts restored footage cut from movie first time round, the question has to be whether or not die-hard fans will make the trip to cinema to see it again, especially when the DVD box-set of the four alien movies contained much of the lost footage itself.

However, for those who’ve never seen Alien, it will provide the perfect opportunity to find out just why the film is regarded as such a classic.

Fox’s ace in the hole however looks like it will the return of the Farrelly Brothers, with what may be possibly be their funniest — and sickest — film to date.

The directors, who are pretty much responsible for the gross-out comedy genre, and gave us such “wholesome family fair” as There’s Something About Mary and Shallow Hal, look to have upped the ante once again.

Starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, Stuck on You tells the humdrum story of conjoined twins who head to Hollywood to make it big.

The politically correct brigade are likely to be up in arms about the subject matter but the trailer certainly made me laugh more than most films.

Sheridan the man behind powerful films such as My Left Foot and In The Name of the Father this time turns his lens on a smaller, more personal, story, although one that is no less moving for that.

In America follows the story of a young Irish family who move to New York, ostensibly so that the father Johnny, played by Paddy Considine in fine form, can pursue his dreams of making it as an actor on Broadway.

The truth, however, is that the family is trying to escape from the death of their son Frankie from a brain tumour.

Both Johnny and his wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) cannot get over the death of their young son, despite uprooting the family to a decrepit apartment in New York, surrounded by drug addicts and transvestites.

So far, so harrowing, but what lifts In America above the mawkishness it could easily descend into is one of the most dreaded phrases is cinema . . . child actors.

The couple’s daughters, Christy and Ariel, played by real life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger, narrate the film and we get to see The Big Apple from their perspective.

These sequences provide the heart of the film as we get to see New York in all its frenetic glory: bigger, louder and brighter than it may appear to an adult.

The children imbue much of what happens to the family with a magical quality, helping them to cope with the loss of their younger brother.

As the movie progresses, the girls befriend their neighbour Mateo (Djimon Hansou), who eventually helps the family to overcome their difficulties.

In America is a first for Sheridan, in that the movie is semi-autobiographical and although it never quite reaches the highs that My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father did, it is still an impressive achievement.

Some scenes, like Johnny, dragging an old air-conditioning unit through busy New York traffic will stay in the mind and despite some genuinely upsetting scenes, the film is ultimately uplifting without ever being contrived.

So it is written in the gospel according to Phil Weir, because I am the Boloney Detector, and this unintelligible religious-cum-supernatural thriller has set more of my sirens off than any big-screen stinker in the last six months.

Two centuries ago and beyond, sin eaters were heretical thorns in the side of the Catholic establishment who, attending the death beds of the ex-communicated, offered them the redemption denied by the church by taking on the burden of their sins.

Cut to the present. Dour, troubled New York priest Alex Bernier (Heath Ledger) is one of the last members of the tough, maverick, Carolingian order. He is old beyond his years. In other words, the script called for an Anthony Hopkins type, but Hollywood demanded someone with smouldering, matinee-idol looks.

When Alex’s mentor Father Dominic dies in Rome, in mysterious circumstances, Cardinal Driscoll (Peter Weller) despatches him to The Vatican to find out what has been going on. The ‘mysterious circumstances’ suggest a sin eater has been at work, especially considering Dominic is an ex-communicant and has some weird marks on his chest — like love bites from a toothless vampire.

For the Rome trip Alex recruits cheery, fat, bearded fellow Carolingian Thomas Garrett (the Full Monty’s Mark Addy doing the Full Friar Tuck) and skinny, beautiful, crazy artist Mara Sinclair (Shannyn Sossamon).

Once in the Holy City, the mumbo jumbo really kicks in.

The action moves from dark dusty chambers, heavy with musty drapes, to dank, echoey vaults complete with torture instruments, and everywhere massive candles are guttering, the screen often seeming to swim with a veritable Tiber of running, dripping wax.

In such localities, old tomes are pored over by Alex and his buddies. As is required in these circumstances, they contain arcane diagrams accompanied by cryptic texts.

Also in such localities, deeply cowled men speak, basso voce, about the rise of a dark pope — sort of Darth Vader in a dog collar.

But more pieces of the jigsaw are required, so the dogged Alex waylays impatient Catholic mandarins who let slip morsels of information which indicate Machiavellian goings-on at the Vatican. And, eventually, Alex encounters the sin eater, who has a strange request to make of the young man.

Of course, now and again, to take one’s mind from the confusing storyline, there are bursts of action featuring special-effects-driven manifestations of evil spirits accompanied by much Crucifix-thrusting by the cassocked posse, in a style first adopted in The Exorcist.

Director Brian Helgeland won an Oscar for his script adaptation of James Ellroy’s crime novel LA Confidential. Later, he set picture-house tills a-ringing as writer/director of quirky A Knight’s Tale. To give The Sin Eater some hoped-for box office oomph, Helgeland has lassooed a triumvirate of his stars from Knight — Ledger, Addy and Sossamon.

Some hope! He could have got The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost to sign on for this one, and even with that illustrious trio aboard, it would still have been a titanic failure.

Helgeland hasn’t so much made a movie as an omelette, and it hasn’t worked. He’s tried to disguise the thin-ness of the tale by throwing a blizzard of supernatural religious thriller genre elements into a bowl and whisking like crazy, hoping for the best, but he’s the one whose ended up beaten, with egg all over his face.

The plot is a triumph of incoherence, which stumbles from the very start, shot in both feet by a script which floats off the actors’ tongues with the lightness of lead ingots showering down a lift shaft.

In short, this is one mess of a movie, which will entertain no one, least of all those who bankrolled it.

To atone for this sin of a film, my advice to Helgeland is to rent a cave. Don a hair shirt. Contemplate a navel. Commune with nature. Rethink life. And then adapt another Ellroy novel.

You see the knock your socks and pants off pandemonium in this film is so in your face that it is enough to drag you into the Underworld (15, seen at Dundee Odeon), writes Finlay Miller.

The curtain rises on a gothic metropolis where the blood- marbled war that has raged for centuries between two clans of vampires and lycans (werewolves), seems to be coming to an end.

The lycans have dwindled in numbers with only a very few believed to be lurking in the bowels of the city.

What’s more the foundations of the vampire mansion are about to be strengthened with the coming rebirth of one of their three legendary leaders.

However leather-clad ‘death dealer’ vamp Seleena (Kate Beckinsale) suspects all is not as it seems and believes that an apparently harmless human called Michael (Scott Speedman) holds a significant importance to the lycans.

On the way to uncovering the truth Seleena falls in love with Michael and has to deal with the vampire coven babysitter Kraven (Shane Brolly), who it soon becomes apparent is not only insanely jealous, but also highly suspicious.

The plot unwinds and the audience is sucked in only to be blown back out by the gunmetal glamour that makes this film the lesson in cool that it is.

It would be a perfect to and fro, however, the plot keeps unravelling and it is just too tightly told to do so properly.

Distracting it may be, but if you can see past the info overload on the roots of the war, cross-breeding, and vampire elder Viktor (Bill Nighy), just enjoy the doom and gloom that seeps through the moonlit streets — you can’t fail to enjoy this film.

The soundtrack has much to do with this as it bangs out a raw metallic noise against a black cityscape, that is only ever punctured by Miss Beckinsale’s pearly set of over-grown canines, which, we can live with.

Director Len Wiseman has a background in the art department and although the dress sense and sets used are very reminiscent of the Matrix and Blade sequels he shifts from scene to scene with arresting style.

There is also a bit of Shakespeare in here too with Seleena an original if typically stunning Juliet Capulet and Michael her tragic Romeo Montague.

Is there a tragic ending? you’ll just have to trip the light fangtastic and find out for yourself. Making the choice to go to see this slick-action, ultra-dark movie with its magnetic title, isn’t a difficult one to make.