Way-out West

The presence of Borgnine - a great journeyman actor - isn't by any means the oddest bit of casting in this peculiar farrago. Eddie Izzard camps it up as the avaricious German mountebank Prosit, proving once again that fine British comedians make tolerable second-rate film actors; while Juliette Lewis, back from Scientology rehab, shows that a fading starlet can still get her kit off and sport in crystal waters, if only for one day at a time.

Mike Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) is a Cajun lad packed off to his abusive uncle in Arizona. After encountering the demonic shootist Wallace Blount (Michael Madsen) in the boudoir of a beautiful young prostitute he has fallen for (with fatal and plot-twisting results), Blueberry goes on the run and is taken in by a group of Tepehuanu Indians.

Here, under the benign tutelage of Kheetsteen, a shaman (Kestenbetsa), and the watchful eye of Runi (Temuera Morrison), Blueberry is initiated into their trippy take on reality.

He returns to white civilisation - the frontier town of Palimeto - where he joins Borgnine in the business of law enforcement, while attempting to broker peaceful relations between the Native Americans and the colonisers.

Into this dusty scene comes Prosit, who has obtained an old map of the Sacred Mountains, and, sponsored by the rancher Sullivan (Geoffrey Lewis), is in search of the gold they are rumoured to hide.

Sullivan's daughter, Maria (Juliette Lewis), is in love with Blueberry, but before he can face up to his feelings for her, he must vanquish his old nemesis Blount, who also has his eyes on the Sacred Mountains. However, Blount desires not money but supernatural powers. In the psychotropic showdown between the two antagonists, much will be revealed about memory and culpability, reality and dream.

Or so, presumably, the director Jan Kounen hoped. I have no requirement that film genres, any more than literary ones, should be pure, but it's difficult to imagine that an enthusiastic audience for this stoners' western would comprise anyone apart from crystal-dangling deadheads.

The western bits of the film are a straight Leone/Peckinpah rip-off, in which Men With No Names kick up the dust, their slickers flapping in the wind

off the mesquite, then stand at the bar while bottles of red-eye are slid into their horny hands. As for the shamanic portions, these are pretty much a retread of the kind of cultural interpenetration done so much better in A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man.

Nevertheless, the opening hour or so does look pretty good, even if the cinematographer (Tetsuo Nagata) has an overfondness for the exaggerated swooping zooms afforded by aerial photography. "Look at me!", every long shot seems to say, "I've got a helicopter, wheee!"

The landscape is beautiful - deep gorges, sprinkled by feathery waterfalls - and Vincent Cassel is an engagingly photogenic hero, who chain-smokes roll-ups to remind you quite how Gallic an affair this is. But once the film gets stuck into being meaningful, as is so often the way with popular cinema, it becomes increasingly dreary.

This is a strange thing to say about a production which visually is so in thrall to psychotropic drugs that it bombards the audience with lengthy sequences of h a l l u c i n a t o r y effects; but it's a peculiar axiom of such films that they are only really effective if you, the viewer, are also tripping out of your box.

The acid trip sequence in Easy Rider, the Saturnian landfall in 2001, the glam fantasia of Tommy - there are countless examples of polymorphous visual perversity in films, which fall utterly flat unless the audience are, like, on the same wavelength.

IN Blueberry, it doesn't help that your "trip guide" Runi is about as plausible as any cod-Castaneda who has swallowed a load of second-hand mystical hokum. In strict psychological terms, the key to Blueberry's mental health lies in the simple act of bringing a repressed memory into his conscious mind, and why he has to down copious amounts of mescaline to do so is utterly beyond me.

Except that it allows Kounen and Nagata to make free with giant spidery monsters, Medusa-men of snakes, which twine and recombine, vaginal protozoa, tentacular spermatozoa, and all the other computerised gubbins which descend through layer after layer after layer, until we discover - as we have always suspected - that the ultimate constituents of reality are, in fact, a lot of microcircuitry with a vaguely Mayan appearance.

As the trip moves inexorably to its peak, deep in the bowels of the Sacred Mountain, this critic felt his eyelids becoming heavier and heavier.

It's a pity, because shorn of pastiche and pretension this could have been a perfectly serviceable film. Michael Madsen, in particular, is never less than watchable, bringing an almost doe-eyed silkiness to the business of villainy, which made him one of the best parts of the stinking mess that was Kill Bill.

Juliette Lewis, who in the past has turned in performances with a certain screeching intensity (Natural Born Killers), is pretty much lost in this. As for Ernest Borgnine, well, there's always the 143rd to look forward to.