Madonna sinks without trace

Watching Madonna shriek, pout and snarl her way through Guy Ritchie's illadvised and disastrous remake of a 1974 Italian film has pretty much driven a spike through the heart of the publicity besotted husband and wife team's future plans to become the next Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.

I wasn't invited to the usual critics' screenings that precede a film's release, so I saw Swept Away with the regular popcorn brigade in a New York cinema on its opening day. I counted three other people in the audience, and two of them were sound asleep.

Madonna plays a bored and miserable jet-set snob on a yachting holiday and Adriano Giannini (in the role filled by his father, Giancarlo, in the original), is a working-class sailor who is shipwrecked with her on a deserted island when their dinghy collapses.

On the surface, the role of a spoiled, self-centred rich bitch would seem to be typecasting. But even blinded by love, Mr Ritchie overlooked one vital fact in remodelling a European classic for his wife: Madonna can't act.

Trained in the Nautilus School of Dramatic Art, her toned and sinewy muscles don't do a thing for sleeveless chiffon, and her hard, chiselled jawlines are a poor substitute for emotional irony. At 44, she's a scary mix of pecs and peroxide.

Spitting out a series of cruel, sarcastic one-liners, she loses sympathy fast, and there is no tempo or timing in the direction, camerawork or editing to make up for what she loses in pacing. Her colourless voice, like a dry and ratchety ambulance siren, is an irritation that cries for medical attention.

When the poor sailor who endures her humiliating, condescending tantrums finally whacks her across the chops, the temptation to yell: "What took you so long?" is hard to resist.

Stranded on that sandy beach, of course, the roles reverse; the peasant who can spear a fish becomes the master, the corrupt lady
capitalist is the slave, and sadomasochism turns to love, Hollywood-style.

But whatever dated message remains from Lina Wertmuller's original Swept Away, the sexual politics have been discarded along with the underwear as the shipwrecked duo pass time playing charades and doing push-ups, karate chops and song-anddance routines, inserted as pointless distractions from the monotony.

The silliest scene in the movie is a fantasy sequence in which the Material Girl bumps and grinds her way through a mambo version of Rosemary Clooney's ossified hit, Come on-a My House. Obviously, the hope is that the movie's losses in revenue will be recouped in an inevitable soundtrack CD marketed for the tone deaf.