Last week, powerful G forces were being exerted on my psyche by Mel Gibson’s audience-dividing The Passion Of The Christ — this week, the challenge to my emotions has come from the Dr Seuss children’s story The Cat In The Hat (PG, seen at Dundee Odeon).

Unlike the hullabaloo that preceded The Passion, word has yet to reach me from the US on whether this big-screen treatment of the tale (more famous Stateside than it is here), has been causing consternation or pleasure among followers of author/illustrator Dr Seuss.

However, my guess is that on these shores at least, controversy over this project will be in the vicinity of nil, although I have no doubt it will be responsible for putting a lot of small bums on wide multiplex seats over the Easter break.

For a start, the film is as pretty as a storybook picture to look at and pays high homage to the stylised, flat-colour illustrations of Dr Seuss himself.

The action is set in the small town of Anville, where everything is painted in matching colours — identical houses all pink, identical cars all green, etc — and all the lawns looks artificial. If you want pointers, think of the communities in Pleasantville and The Truman Show, but with the corporate look cranked up to the nth degree.

But as is always the case in such movies, not all is perfect in this idealised suburbia and if you take a peek beyond the curtains of the dream home occupied by widowed Mom (Kelly Preston) and her kids Sally and Conrad (Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin), there are dysfunctions aplenty to be seen.

Mom is struggling to hold down a demanding job and keep the family afloat, and the children, although much loved, are somewhat neglected — a state of affairs which has turned Sally into a control freak and Conrad into a rule-breaker. Plus the kids see right through sleazy neighbour Quinn (Alec Baldwin), who’s all for marrying Mom and packing Conrad off to a military academy.

One afternoon when the kids are alone with their headaches, hang-ups and a deeply-sleeping babysitter, the mysterious Cat In The Hat (Mike Myers) comes calling. This adult-sized feline with a good heart but a taste for mayhem sets out to turn Sally and Conrad back into normal fun-loving kids, no matter how much domestic chaos that entails.

Although the story is slight, The Cat In The Hat is memorable on two fronts.

It is a triumph of production design, which comes as no surprise considering the source material and the fact that first-time director Bo Welch’s CV is crammed with production design and art direction credits — he has obviously been the man for the job.

And not only is it just the town which offers visual delights. The Cat loves his weird contraptions — everything from handheld devices to full-blown vehicles.

The film also features a marvellously over-the-top performance from Myers which allows him to showboat in the fashion of Jim Carrey in The Grinch (2000), the movie that got the big-screen Seuss ball rolling.

However, I don’t know if it was down to the tall hat, but Myers frequently had me pondering memories of W. C. Fields. Special effects aside, Myers’ performance, containing songs and lots of smart one-liners, is of almost vaudevillian proportions.

Films like Showgirls, Plan 9 From Outer Space and Dude, Where’s My Car? have developed a cult following among a crowd who enjoy ‘so bad it’s good’ films.

I wonder if Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (certificate PG, seen at Dundee UGC) might one day be embraced in the same way.

This film can certainly not be enjoyed on any sort of conventional level. It’s a barrage of fast-moving colours and little else, with about the same artistic merit as an hour-and-a-half episode of the Teletubbies.

So little regard is given to the plot or scripting in a film like this that it’s barely worth mentioning.

The film is full of so many twists that nothing shocks by the end. The crux of the plot in brief is that a masked villain sabotages the opening of a museum celebrating the gang’s achievements and unleashes a host of slimy monsters on the city.

Part of the appeal of the first Scooby Doo film was to see how the cartoon would be translated to the big screen and many people were caught off guard by the possessed performance of Matthew Lillard in the role of Shaggy.

The same cast — with Freddy Prinze Jr as alpha male Fred, Sarah Michelle Gellar as vinyl boot-clad hottie Daphne and Linda Cardellini as dorky Velma — return for the sequel, along with the completely CGI Scooby but the element of surprise has been lost. All that’s left are flat jokes about farting, recycled scenes with Scooby and Shaggy scared, and as many Burger King product placements as possible.

Scooby Doo 2 is so universally poor from its script, to its direction, to its special effects, that one day a cult following may embrace it.

But most people will feel the film should have be called Scooby Doo 2: Tedium Unleashed.

(Warner, £22.99)

THE special effects are ground- breaking and the action is innovative and breathtaking, writes Stuart Johnstone. The actors still look cool and the plot brings the events of the first two films to a conclusion, yet it is hard to see The Matrix Revolutions as anything other than a disappointment.

The final chapter of The Matrix Trilogy begins where Reloaded left off. Neo (Keanu Reeves) lies in a coma after his encounter with the machines, while Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are still looking for a way to defeat the rapidly approaching machine invasion force and save the last city, Zion.

Morpheus is also left struggling with the revelation that the concept of ‘The One,’ the man who will free humanity, could be just another tactic by the enemy to retain control over the human population.

After Neo awakens, the gang are thrust into a climactic encounter as Zion is devastated by the machines. The last stand sees Neo returning to the world of The Matrix, where he sets about bringing the war to an end once and for all.

The first and best Matrix was a hugely original film, which explored the nature of reality, while at the same time smashing the boundaries for sci-fi action through the now much-copied bullet-time camera tricks. Even Reloaded, which was weighed down by philosophical nonsense, still managed to deliver some fantastic action while successfully developing The Matrix universe.

Revolutions, on the other hand, brings the story to a conclusion with a whimper instead of the much-deserved bang. After all the Wachowski brothers’ innovation in the first two films, the ending turns out to be a thorough letdown. Revolutions also suffers structurally, with long periods of time when none of the main characters appear. The battle in Zion looks spectacular, but it is dwelled upon for too long. There are only a certain number of times a sentinel (the machine drones) can attack before it starts to become boring and routine.

On the upside, the fight with French baddie The Merovingian in a nightclub where his bodyguards walk across the ceilings and walls, shows flashes of the genius that made the original Matrix stand out. The so-called burly brawl, the final encounter between Neo and Agent Smith (the excellent Hugo Weaving) is also impressive.

The problem with Revolutions is that with the first Matrix, the Wachowskis established a bar so high it was always going to be difficult to improve on. Against most contemporary science fiction, The Matrix Revolutions is streets ahead, but compared to the standard of the first film, it is miles behind.

Extras: A two-disc release, Revolutions, like its DVD predecessors, offers a comprehensive look into the making of the film, with featurettes on the special effects, a look at the filming of key scenes and diaries of the actors training and rehearsals for the demanding roles. There is also a look at the overall Matrix timeline.