Johnny's magic is real thing

Johnny Depp plays Mort Raine, a cuckolded husband licking his wounds in a lakeside cabin some six months after his wife has left him for another man. Mort was once a successful thriller writer - really a young Stephen King (the film is based on a King novella) - but has been stuck on the same sentence for a long time. Instead of working, he dozes on the couch, watched anxiously by his grizzly dog, Chico.

One day a stranger called Shooter (John Turturro) comes calling, threatening to do terrible things if Mort doesn't admit to having plagiarised a story. This man has hate roaring in his chest.

Feeling besieged, Mort reaches crisis point and his life heads towards catastrophe - but the movie delivers the thrills too intermittently and too late for us to feel a chill.

Very few films taken from King stories (and there have been so many adaptations - 45, at last count) have managed to grasp his drooling relish at the thought of us gasping.

This is a man who sweetly introduced a collection of short stories with, "Don't let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it's no big deal: it's only because you are my love." King's keen warmth - one of his key qualities - is usually the least translatable to film. Ironically, in Secret Window, all of the writer's warmth comes through but none of his frights. The movie dawdles rather than flows, and is all-ofasudden too pulpy, rambunctious.

Actually, there isn't much of a movie here at all. But there is always Depp. This actor's closest analogue is perhaps the great silent clown Buster Keaton - these are performers with an ability to transmit immediate intimacy, while creating characters whose side it is impossible not to be on, and you would be hard-pushed to find a cinemagoer of any age that doesn't respond.

By far the director David Koepp's best decision was to indulge in a riveted idolatry of his star. His camera follows Depp around like a besotted fan, and Chico's panting (heard off screen much of the time) could be his.

We see Depp eat a bag of crisps, smoke a cigarette, read his Hunter S Thompson. I can't name an actor quite so lionised of late. And yet Depp doesn't preen. His magic is the real thing.

Secret Window
Cert: cert12A