Mr Magoo

Live action cartoons would benefit from being like The Mask, a bit of a hybrid. Instead, they are a travesty - eg The Flintstones. Hollywood should pass on farce. It seems to have forgotten everything it ever learnt from Chaplin, Keaton and The Keystone Cops.

Mr Magoo's problem is that he's blind as a bat and keeps mistaking the hat stand for his secretary. Leslie Nielsen makes a stab at him, before being hijacked by the scriptwriters and hurled into a B-picture thriller spoof. He manages the voice, but the visual impairement is hit or miss, mainly miss.

Kelly Lynch is the female equivilant of Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, except she works for herself. She wears sexy wigs, skin-tight biker gear and kicks beefy guys in the face. She steals the biggest ruby in the world from a museum, which, by a stroke of Pat Proft's pen, ends up in Mr Magoo's pocket. Result: a chase sequence, followed by the villains convention in South America, followed by the ruby's auction in a swimming pool, followed by another chase sequence. Squeezing a titter out of this proves as difficult as squeezing Kelly into her clothes.

Children don't find big chested girls in bikinis, or an old bloke bumbling about, remotely funny. The humour is at the level of cross-dressing Magoo as a blushing bride and sending him over a waterfall. The business with the ruby takes precedent as a plot device, leaving eyesight deficiency gags as fillers. By the end any gag would have done.