Retro sci-fi 'Sky Captain' falls from grace, but stars are eye candy

Some films are so enjoyable to watch that, as a film critic upon reaching the picture's end, one is a bit disheartened to realize one cannot in good conscience praise it. First-time writer-director Kerry Conran's flashy piece of eye candy "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is such a film, and despite my slight reservation, the film has enough and deep enough flaws that I cannot fail to take it to task.

"Sky Captain" falls into a genre that, to good effect, it has almost entirely to itself. Best described as retro-sci-fi, the film is artistically and technologically placed in the Roaring '20s, but as with all else in the film, the social context is astoundingly ambiguous. The leading lady is a stereotypically aggressive and cold reporter, Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow of "Shakespeare in Love" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), determined to get to the bottom of bizarre worldwide attacks by giant robots that start almost as soon as the camera rolls. To further enrich the triteness of the picture, Perkins is led along on her adventures by a former lover, the heroic mercenary Sky Captain Joe Sullivan (Jude Law of "Cold Mountain" and "AI: Artificial Intelligence"). As they try to track down evil genius Dr. Totenkopf (stock footage of Laurence Olivier) to stop his mechanized army from destroying all life on earth, they flit from Shangri-La to the middle of the Pacific, winding through treacherous situations, romantic entanglements and a wide variety of dazzling, if utterly absurd, visuals. For good measure, they are assisted by another of Sullivan's former mistresses, Captain Francesca "Franky" Cook (Angelina Jolie of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Girl, Interrupted"), an imposing and eye-patched beauty (you have to see it to believe it) who pilots an aircraft carrier for the Royal Air Force.

To put it quite simply, the film could hardly be more utterly absurd and astoundingly overdone than it is. The characters bear no relation to anything one could classify as real. The visuals make no attempt to resemble any sort of real-life sensation; instead, they embody a sort of odd conceptualization of the era held by some, but I hope not many, modern Americans. Beyond that, the film has no context, no back story, no direction, no motivation, no coherence and no theme.

However, if one can forgive all of this, I must admit the film is a fun thing to do on a Saturday evening. First, it is fairly short, weighing in at just over a 107 minutes. Second, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie and especially Gwyneth Paltrow are extremely good looking people and look particularly appealing in the near-black-and-white, ultra-made-up world in which "Sky Captain" is set. Finally, the utter bizarreness of the film is captivating in a way that is hard to explicate.

So while I certainly do not recommend the film as a form of enlightenment to anyone, if one is looking for a fun action flick to boggle your mind, one could do worse than this second rater. It plays at 1:30 p.m., 4:20 p.m., 7 p.m. and 9:35 p.m. at AMC Hamilton 24.