This is an uneven and somewhat inane caper comedy by Danny Boyle, who made the popular British film "Trainspotting", as well as "Shallow Grave", a scary little 1995 thriller which I thought was really good and should have gotten more recognition.

      Ewan McGregor, a staple in Boyle's movies, stars as a janitor who is fired from the company he works for because the company plans to replace the human cleaning crew with robots. He breaks into the office of the CEO (Ian Holm) with a gun to demand his job back; this doesn't go too well and he ends up kidnapping the boss's daughter (Cameron Diaz), who hates her father and is all too willing to go along for the ride. Meanwhile, 2 angels (Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo) try to hook up McGregor and Diaz any way they can.

      I liked McGregor in this movie; I think he's very talented and I look forward to seeing him as the young Obi Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels. Diaz is all right. She starts out annoying, but I liked her more near the end (she was better in "My Best Friend's Wedding".) But the film could have totally done without the angels. The filmmakers seem to be aiming for "Touched by an Angel" meets "Pulp Fiction" here, and it just doesn't work. And the film really starts to lose steam near the end; it opens promisingly and then seems to get more and more pretentious. I hated the ending sequence, in which McGregor and Diaz look at the camera and say some mumbo-jumbo about how they were destined for one another while scenes we just saw unfold behind them. And it could have done without the claymation sequence.

      And it's never really funny. There are a couple of funny moments (such as McGregor's attempts to sound fierce while demanding a ransom, and his idea for a pulp novel), but mostly there are just a few chuckles here and there.

      Well, if anything, it's not as bad as the similarly themed "Excess Baggage".

Danny Bronstein, 1997