Derailed

After wailing to Oprah at length about Brad's treachery, one would think Jennifer Aniston could not embarrass herself further. Think again: with Derailed, she makes a desperate bid to overturn her girl-next-door image by playing the kind of femme fatale that Sharon Stone and Linda Fiorentino used to pull off without breaking a nail. The problem is that without her Friends, Aniston's blandness is all too evident - the woman doesn't have a fatale bone in her over-publicised body.

Yet the blame for this mess should not be borne solely, or even primarily, by Aniston. A distasteful exercise in exploitation, trying to disguise itself as a Hitchcockian thriller, Derailed hurtles along on twin tracks of sadism and a near-surreal lack of logic, pushing its actors ahead of it like stunned beasts. And if your idea of a nice evening out is seeing Clive Owen gobsmacked - literally - for close on two hours, then this is the movie for you.

Owen plays Charles Schine, an unhappy adm an whose sleek boss (Tom Conti) has just removed him from his most lucrative account. There's no solace for Charles at home, either, with a marriage cracking under the strain of a diabetic daughter (Addison Timlin) and a stressed-out wife (Melissa George). So when he meets Lucinda (Aniston), a sexy banker with a husband and child of her own, his morning commute becomes much more fun. As Lucinda leans in close and subtly hints at marital dissatisfaction, Charles is ready to have his world rocked. Little does he know.

Chaste lunches and phone calls lead to a seemingly spontaneous motel room tryst, but no sooner are the pair squirming awkwardly in pre-coital heat than a hooded gunman bursts in, robbing Charles and raping Lucinda. The scene is hideously brutal and Charles, racked with guilt over his inability to protect Lucinda, agrees when she begs him not to call the police. This idiotic decision fuels the remainder of the movie as the robber, a French psycho named LaRoche (Vincent Cassel), begins a campaign of escalating blackmail and leering threats. And though the ensuing plot twists are undeniably preposterous, the movie succeeds in building a sickening kind of momentum until it finally wears itself out - though not before the audience is more exhausted than its bloodied protagonist.

Based on a novel by James Siegel and a screenplay by Stuart Beattie (Collateral), Derailed is the English-language debut of Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom (Evil). A hodgepodge of cosmopolitan influences - British, French and American actors, as well as two hip-hop artists, RZA and Xzibit - the movie has a Euro-ghetto gloss that's highlighted by Hafstrom's noirish direction. But as Charles is knocked from one gory scene to another, battered and bruised and incapable of making one sensible decision, it becomes clear that Derailed is getting off on male impotence. In one memorable scene, as Charles' equipment is mercilessly squeezed by a sneering LaRoche, we realize we're watching nothing more than an elaborate emasculation fantasy.

But with a little more help, Owen just might have saved this picture. His unique brand of forlorn machismo - so devastating in Croupier and Closer - makes him the perfect passive hero (when push comes to pummel, we know he'll rouse himself). Moving from the gleaming glass sterility of Charles' corporate office to the seedier parts of Chicago's underworld, Owen is as nauseatingly watchable as a slow-motion car wreck. His pairing with the hyperactive Cassel - polar opposite in acting style - is visually volatile and not entirely successful. As the creamy villain of Ocean's Twelve, Cassel's Gallic suaveness and mischievous amorality were a delight; here, however, LaRoche's unvarying sadism gives the actor only a single, weary note to play.

Derailed is the first release for the battered Weinstein brothers after their messy divorce from Disney, so it's not surprising they would choose a revenge project. This isn't your father's Fatal Attraction, but it sure looks like it.