Watchmen: up, up and have it away I Kevin Maher's review I Blockbuster Buzz review I The most darkly ambitious of graphic novels I Interview with Dave Gribbons

The seminal cartoon written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons for DC Comics paints a ghastly alternative picture of the world in 1985. Richard Nixon has just won his fifth term in office. The Americans won in Vietnam. The Cold War is in full nuclear bloom. The newsreel footage of a hippy putting a flower down the barrel of a soldier's gun — and then getting shot five seconds later, off camera — is a twisted rerun of an iconic image.

Zack Snyder’s epic version of Watchmen is heroically faithful to the pitch-black humour of Moore’s original novel. The poisonous irony is terribly simple. America has reached this apocalyptic impasse through the patriotic services of a gang of out-of-fashion, basically retired superheroes called Watchmen who have chummy photographs of Nixon on the mantelpiece to prove it. Blind loyalty to a rotten regime has turned them into lonely, anonymous cynics who exorcise their guilty memories with the usual liver-wrecking staples. Which is basically where the film begins.

Snyder’s fatal mistake is trying to tell a story that leaps from hard-boiled film noir to a lovers’ tiff on Mars. How do you attach a thriller that begins with a James Bond slow-motion shot of a body tossed through a plate-glass window to the story of a neo-Nazi Egyptian pharaoh in the Arctic who has a finger on the Doomsday bomb? And meanwhile a masked murderer is bumping off old superheroes for all sorts of grim reasons. After two hours and 40 bum-numbing minutes of sawn-off limbs and broken bones you really don’t care.

There are two good reasons why Hollywood failed to put Watchmen on screen for more than 20 years. One: the plot looks like a bowl of spaghetti. Two: middle-aged caped crusaders look profoundly silly in the flesh. Finally, you know the film is sinking when a roomful of 20st bruisers shrinks in fear when two strangers walk into their local pub dressed, respectively, in a potato sack and a pair of skintight gold underpants topped off with plastic pointy ears.

The surreal exception to the less-than-superhuman tribe in Watchmen is Billy Crudup’s radioactive neon god, Dr Manhattan, who is worthy of a film to himself. He is magnificently out of tune with the film. Unfortunately his light-bulb moment of enlightenment, his realisation that “life is a miracle”, shines as brightly as a one-watt candle.

Snyder’s last-ditch attempt to raise the geeky bar by introducing “real” people dressed up as heroes is more adolescent than adult, as is the addition of e nough soft-core 1970s bump and grind to win an 18 certificate.

His film hits the target only when he is spoofing Cold War fears. In some ways it’s a lament for old-school paranoia. In a chat-show interview a perky Pat Buchanan confirms that the planet is only five metaphorical minutes from nuclear midnight. Black-and-white war- room scenes featuring trigger-happy generals and a podgy Nixon (whose nose has sprouted an extra 2in) are clever and mocking. Except that Kubrick got here in 1964 and did an infinitely more amusing job in Dr Strangelove. Bring a pillow.

18, 160 mins

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