Whatever you might have expected from director Brian De Palma's account of the 1931 battle of wills between clean-cut law enforcer Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and gangland tsar Al Capone (Robert De Niro), it couldn't have been a re-run of the old Robert Stack TV series.

Yet that's more or less what you get, done with some style, and the addition of blood (lots of it) and expletives.

And there's a further dimension in the shape of Sean Connery's veteran cop, who joins and mentors the Untouchables; this fully-rounded portrait deservedly won Connery an Academy Award.

Otherwise, there's the same vacuum feeling about the periods between the action, and the same slow build-up to the set-pieces themselves, which are hard-hitting, but only rarely anything but predictable.

Costner, steely-eyed and distant, vaguely echoes Stack in the original; De Niro makes Capone just a blustering, if dangerous, bully.

Like him, this bumper bundle of guns and gangsters (gals hardly get a look in) doesn't quite punch its weight.