The Wicker Man (remake)

Things you could do in 108 minutes:

Make a scale replica of Blackpool Tower out of your own bogies.

Run up to complete strangers making clucking noises.

Carefully lick clean all your garden ornaments.

All of which would be a far more productive and useful way to spend your time than watching a remake of The Wicker Man with none of the charm, wit, energy or music of the original, and a large dollop of misogyny put in its place.

Okay, a reviewer should be balanced and should be willing to say both what's good and what's bad about a movie. So I'll start by listing its good points:

There's a rather nice seaplane in it.

Anyway, moving on...

Just about every aspect of this movie – dialogue, acting, characterisation, plot – is massively inferior to the original. Let's start with the main character, the cop searching for a missing child on a remote island, originally played by Edward Woodward. When the role was played by Woodward, he was a quite unsympathetic character in many ways; a stuffy, priggish fundamentalist Christian. But at the same time he had a sense of duty, and a strong sense of right and wrong. He was utterly determined to see justice done. You could still feel something for him. This time around, the cop is played by Nicholas Cage. He goes by the name Edward Malus, searching for the missing girl Rowan Woodward (Geddit? He's called Edward, and the missing girl's surname is....oh never mind).

Oh, and he's a blithering idiot. At the beginning of the film, Cage's character is asked by a fellow cop, “Are you going to apply for detective?” It's probably a good job he doesn't, because when he reaches the island (now renamed from Summerisle to Summersisle – ooh, look, they've put an extra s in there!) he displays all the detective skills of a two year old. People keep telling him, “Tomorrow is a festival of DEATH.....and rebirth.” Somehow he fails to interpret this as, “We're going to kill you.”

He also has an allergy to bee stings. So naturally he runs straight into a beehive, then runs around screaming, “Aiieee! One sting could kill me! I must run further into the complex of beehives! Aiieeee!” For crying out loud, Edward Woodward was never such a dimwit.

Then there's the dreadful lines that Cage is forced to deliver, that had the cinema audience bursting into spontaneous laughter. My favourite is the bicycle-jacking scene, where Cage pulls a gun on an cycling islander and tells her to, “Step away from the bike.” A line that had the audience rolling in the aisles.

Then there's the pagan religion that the cop encounters when he reaches the island. In the original, it was a religion based around sexual liberation and love of nature, inspired by various snippets of folklore that the scriptwriter had collected from around the British Isles. [Ed – make that most of James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’!] Now, it's a religion of goddess-worshipping women who were persecuted by the Christian Church in its effort to suppress the feminine; causing them to flee the witch trials to the New World, taking a few casualties at Salem along the way, before finally arriving at an island off the Pacific coast of America.

The general outlook of the religion appears to be Dianic Wicca meets Valerie Solanis. The men on the island are emasculated and powerless, with their tongues cut out. Little more than occasionally useful penises that wander around and get in the way. The women are all-powerful and address each other as “Sister”. This, combined with their stony-faced expressions and rough-weave dresses makes them resemble 1980s Greenham Common protesters. By halfway through the film, you want to scream, “Okay, we get it! YOU DON'T LIKE FEMINISTS!” Britt Ekland must be spinning in her sunbed.

Ultimately, the lesson of the remake appears to be this: give wommyn the vote, and they'll get more and more uppity, until they bung you into a giant burning wicker man. Better put a stop to it now, preferably by getting our hero Edward Malus (Geddit? Edward Male Us? Oh, forget it) to punch women out and then run around in a giant bear costume that makes him look like Yogi Bear.

Still, Nicholas Cage probably ought to get used to dressing up in silly animal outfits. After this movie, he'll being doing panto this time next year.