Lemme give it to you straight – Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek generate as much spark as a box of matches on the Poseidon. And all the moonlit skinny-dips in the world won't change it, see?

Farrell talks us through this Depression-era piece as Arturo Bandini, an ambitious but mediocre Italian-American writer who mistakes meanness and a line in smart patter for charm.

Hayek is Camilla Lopez, a feisty coffee-slinger from Mexico who's desperate to get a whitebread husband because her type doesn’t fit into 1930s LA society.

She calls him "dago"; he calls her "spick". He treats dames with disdain; she knocks around with her boss. He's all torn up because she gets under his skin. Ain't life peachy?

Bandini distracts himself by eating oranges at his typewriter and picking up his own stalker, Vera. But that relationship doesn't go any place since Vera's a sorry soul whose run of bad luck ends abruptly during an earthquake.

Donald Sutherland occasionally shuffles into Bandini's room as confused and under-written neighbour Hellfrick: "gassed in the Great War, and gassed ever since."

Ask The Dust's producer Tom Cruise is evidently a fan of Robert Towne, having acted out his screenplays in Days Of Thunder, The Firm and the first two Mission: Impossibles.

But if he stayed awake through the 1988 non-thriller Tequila Sunrise, Cruise must know that Towne's no director - and this script is no Chinatown.

The novel's themes of prejudice and unfulfilled dreams are paid lipservice, but Towne is more interested in fooling around with soft-boiled dialogue, like Raymond Chandler on Valium. (Someone even says "What's the big idea?")

It's not enough to make the central romance any more interesting or convincing. All of a sudden they stop trading smart comebacks so that they can make all cuddly on the beach and worry about that nasty cough she's picked up.

I didn't buy it, not for a minute. Sure, it all looks great, but jeez, does it ever move slow.

Elliott Noble