Thunderbirds aren't go

Dear Aunt Ethel,

I am so glad you're coming up to London with Charlotte (11) and Tim (9). My, how they must have grown! But I'm not quite sure that you should take them to see Thunderbirds, especially since you say that Charlotte is a great fan of the telly series. Quite what she'll think of the film, I don't know, because it is more than a bit different. Tim might be okay, though, since I remember he liked Spy Kids, which it resembles rather more than Gerry Anderson's 39-year-old original.

It's a very noisy film, with everybody except Sir Ben Kingsley shouting pretty hard, from start to finish, in order to be heard above the din of the Thunderbird spacecraft - so I don't really think it's for you. It certainly wasn't for me either, since even when the Tracy family shouted their loudest, I couldn't always make out what they were saying.

Tell Charlotte that if she expects humanoid puppets, she'll be a bit upset. The human cast are puppets all right, but only in the sense that the Tracy kids aren't very well defined and the screenplay sort of irons out everything, anyway. She might be annoyed, too, that Lady Penelope's pink car is no longer a Rolls-Royce and that a lot of the gadgets have been unrecognisably refurbished.

But she and Tim are sure to enjoy Sophia Myles as Lady P and Ron Cook as Parker, her faithful chauffeur and dogsbody, who packs such a good right hook that Frank Bruno would certainly take a count just to avoid it. In the final scenes, Lady P wears one of those lovely beehive hairdos you used to have in the Sixties. Or was it the Fifties?

Sir Ben, by the way, whom I know you have liked ever since watching Gandhi, plays the villain this time. His name is The Hood and he sends the Thunderbirds on a fake mission from their HQ on Tracy Island in order to divert them from his intended robbery of the Bank of London-"Ah, the chariot of the Gods!", he exclaims. Quite what he meant I don't know, but his best moments are when he uses his X-ray eyes to zap the Tracys, just when they think they have his measure.

Of course, he gets zapped himself in the end, but one of the Tracy kids refuses to let him die because, as you must know, they are there to rescue people, and honour is honour.

The main dilemma for the Tracys, apart from what to do about The Hood, is whether billionaire Dad (Bill Paxton) is going to allow Alan (Brady Corbet) to become a Thunderbird like the others, since he tends to act before he thinks - not what Thunderbirds are supposed to do. In the end, Alan proves so brave that he's welcomed into the circle like the longlost son he is.

All this gets a bit lost in all the blood and thunder. But rest assured, the violence is strictly fantasyland and there is only one nasty word in the whole picture - when Alan's classmates have the temerity to call the spaceships of International Rescue " Thunderturds". But, then, schoolchildren do tend to have lavatorial minds sometimes, don't they?

Tim should know that the special effects are not very special, but okay for most of the time, though we've seen them all before.

But, Ethel dear, I do think you should take them to Spider-Man 2, another one trying to save the world but much more convincingly. You have to make a lot of concessions before you are endeared to Thunderbirds, and I'm not sure Charlotte and Tim are prepared to. I must say, I was more than a bit underwhelmed.

Thunderbirds
Cert: PG