Playing it by the book

Don't panic! Douglas Adams can rest easy, even if he can't be with us to see what's been made of the long-gestated film of his cult novel. It's a good bet that he would give the result his approval, a quibble or two apart.

It's faithful in tone, if not as fun to watch as the book was to read or the radio adaptation was to listen to. Though it doesn't quite live up to our own imaginations, fertilely plumbed by Adams's own, it should prove a hit.

Part of the success lies in the shrewdness of the casting. We must be grateful that the idea of pushing Hugh Grant into the rumpled persona of Arthur Dent, the little man who goes on an intergalactic journey when Earth is demolished to make way for a bypass, was quickly quashed.

Even so, handing The Office's Martin Freeman the star role was still an act of some faith. He gives, however, the best performance in the film. He's the identifiably human face around which the rest swirls.

Rapper Mos Def is good, too, as Ford Prefect, the best friend who turns out to be an alien. And if Sam Rockwell doesn't really fit the bill as President Beeblebrox, the ambitious commander of the spaceship in which they travel, there's a fresh performance from Zooey Deschanel as Trillion, the girl poor Arthur fancies and Beeblebrox gets.

Our unseen guide is Stephen Fry, who knows how to time a line with aplomb. As for the snotty-nosed, lumbering Vogons, you couldn't ask for better approximations of the parody civil servants we all love to hate. A bit of a surprise is the fact that Alan Rickman's lugubrious robot and Bill Nighy's planet designer Startibartfastdon't make the most of their lines.

Though designed with some skill, this is not a movie that will give George Lucas nightmares - it isn't a big, brash American product relying on the wonder of its special effects.

The effects are there, but they hardly take the breath away. In fact, what's nice about the film is its typically British irony and wry, absurdist, and sometimes almost ramshackle, tone. The one largely missing factor in Garth Jennings's oddball epic, however, is Adams's pawky sense of humour, despite the recycling of a good many of the old jokes. It seldom made me laugh, and it surely should have.

But, all things considered, this space odyssey that refuses to go the usual way, has more virtues than vices. It seems to know that it has to attempt to be something different - and in that it succeeds.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Cert: PG