Bell is back

The main interest in Michael Bassett's Deathwatch, filmed in the Czech Republic and set in the First World War, will be in Jamie Bell. A pity, then, that for his first film since Billy Elliot he's chosen this exploitative horrorflick which does the memory of British infantrymen no honour by turning them into human ghouls.

A bunch of Our Boys tumbles into a German trench and, one by one, are driven to acts of murder, scalping, degutting and what looks like crucifixion. The idea that the worst battlefield horrors lie within the combatants has already been seen on screen this year more suspensefully, if less viscerally, in Rob Green's The Bunker. Deathwatch trivialises it into titillating shots of near-corpses slithering primaevally out of the mud and rats gnawing the genitalia of wounded Tommies.

Surreally, the barbed wire develops its own enveloping life, and a pile of cadavers slowly implodes like a failed soufflè. Visually, the film is striking, but monotonous: mud, mud, inglorious mud is all you see. The soldiers never remotely resemble people of their First World War period or class, simply today's F-ing yobs in khaki. Morally it's as blameworthy and trivial as that other bit of well-marketed zombie rubbish, 28 Days Later, both of them projecting physical repugnance in place of any psychological comment. A bad sign when debut directors, or even established ones like Danny Boyle, go scavangingin the B-picture morgues for their box-office audience.

Bell plays an illicitly enlisted 16-year-old - all the characters are stock fitments of war films. He has little to do, beyond register concerned surprise as his mates go nuts. Andy Serkis's private, who's had an enjoyable prewar life as a murderer, takes to the slaughter of his own men with the machete that was in every kitbag as if he were giving an audition performance for Apocalypse Now: The Prequel.

LAURENCE Fox is the plummy-voiced officer who finds Serkis posing his latest victim in the Christ posture and, with commendable coolness, orders, "Take that man down - get fell in for inspection." In this set of cracked loonies, Bell hardly rings at all. Admittedly, he hasn't much to sink his actor's milk teeth into; but either we still haven't the slightest talent in Britain for developing discoveries like him, or else the acting he did in Billy Elliot owed more than we knew to Stephen Daldry's direction.

Deathwatch
Cert: cert15