The bedrooms of teenage conspiracy theorists across America will be resonating like metronomes thanks to director Richard Kelly's latest paranoid take on, well, everything.
Three years after Texan Independence Day celebrations were marred by a nuclear bomb, the world - or America's version of it - is a place of all-consuming state control versus an unseen enemy.
The internet is now administered by a sort of technology-literate Cruella De Vil (Miranda Richardson) and Uncle Sam is embroiled in a huge scrap in Hustler-sponsored tanks with most of the Middle East.
Squaring up to a draconian government from their cafe on Venice Beach are the Neo-Marxists, a loose coalition of bolshie lesbians, slacker freedom fighters and Commie hardmen.
Into this maelstrom of barely-suppressed anarchy steps Boxer Santaros (The Rock), a memory-blanked TV action hero who has hooked up with Sarah Michelle Gellar's entrepreneurial porn queen.
He can't remember the sinister explosion out in the desert that robbed him of recollection...and the realisation he's married to Mandy Moore, the rich kid daughter of a corrupt industrialist.
Weaving his way in and out of the top-heavy narrative is Seann William Scott's cop, who's desperate to locate his doppelganger.
Confused, you will be...
but only those who unflinchingly dismissed The Matrix as a self-referential pile of techno-babble will admit it.
Kelly divides audiences into two camps: those who thought Donnie Darko was an omniscient genius's pertinent comment on an America that had lost touch with its soul, and those who considered it the work of a geeky film student who struck lucky.
This rather supports the latter view. It's a case of emperor's new clothes...but an eye-catching set of threads that were painstakingly and expensively fashioned on Savile Row.
He's a director with a lot of ideas and, unfortunately, both the good and the bad ones end up on the screen like the preliminary results of a paranoid brainstorming session.
The ambivalence of the cast leaves impressionable Yank conspiracy nerds free rein to read what they will into the vague motivation of the characters placed before them.
The addition of Justin Timberlake's voiceover after the movie's debut debacle at Cannes does rather suggest even Kelly twigged most of us don't have a clue what he's on about.
And yet. And yet it's curiously watchable with an inspired piece of casting with The Rock and comedy setpieces written by a funnyman who never had a humorous thought in his life.
As Kelly - a man with salivating love affair with himself - once commented: "I tried to do too much and I failed."
Tim Evans
