Comic-book capers (sometimes on the dark side) with very watchable special effects (and lots of them), this runs like an old Republic serial of the Forties on a mega-dollar budget. When Alec Baldwin's caped crusader is trapped inside a locked chamber, you expect 'Next Week: Episode 16 - The Cyclotrode Ray' to flash across the screen. Paying little attention to logic - the hero and villain (John Lone) have equal powers, yet the heroine can be hypnotised by one but not the other - the film charges into its story of a man who turned away from evil in Tibet and re-emerged to fight it 'in that most wretched lair of iniquity we know as New York City'. Much of the dialogue springs as if from balloons on the printed page, and the acting is appropriately rudimentary - rather more so, perhaps, in the cases of Ian McKellen and Tim Curry, as the heroine's father and villain's smarmy ally.

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