Well, that was pretty tame and tedious.
And it's a shame as, at its core, there are some really good ideas, but the execution really let this one down.
It's 2415, and humanity has been all but eradicated by a virus some 400 years ago. Only one city remains, Bregna, a walled city governed by the Goodchild dynasty, led by one Trevor Goodchild, descendant of the man who found the cure for the virus on the brink of humankind's extinction.
Charlize Theron plays Aeon Flux (I'm not making this up), an assassin working for a group who called themselves The Monicans, rebels against the ruling regime. Aeon is sent to kill Trevor but, when her own sister is killed, her loyalties seem to change.
With an unusual visual style that borrows partly from The Matrix, partly from, perhaps, Minority Report, the visual confusion perhaps reflects the overall lack of cohesion on display.
The direction is flat to the point of being one dimensional, and Theron is about as anaemic a leading lady as I can remember in a movie.
In tone, it reminded me a little of Elektra, and that's no bloody compliment.
As mentioned, there are some good ideas lurking beneath the surface - the walled city surrounded by encroaching vegetation, the body mods the assassins have to improve performance, the recordings that can only be accessed by drinking a fluid - but the stultifyingly poor direction kills everything stone dead.
Not one I'd recommend, children.
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