I have recently returned from Japan. Flight is a pleasure only for the unimaginative or those who actively enjoy thinking about their own messy death. I am neither of those but I coped with my 22 hours in the air by watching all the films that I had previously either missed or avoided that were offered by the in-flight entertainment system. This strategy had the twin benefits of either distracting me from the prospect of plunging screaming to my death against the Russian mountains thousands of feet below me, or enabling me to see this nightmarish end to my life as at least preferable to spending more time with Vin Diesel.

The real high point was “The Departed”, a cracking thriller which is only a couple of shades overblown and only a few twists too convoluted. Though I did also surprise myself by enjoying the first half of “Star Trek”. Until I realised that the battering space battles only felt quite so bone shakingly realistic and engaging because we’d hit some heavy turbulence and everything really was rattling. In the end “Star Trek” lost my sympathy for having the sheer gaul of ending with Leonard Nimoy doing the famous original voice over… you cannot give me a remake of a forty year-old tv series and claim to be “boldly going where no man has gone before”. Clearly JJ Abrahams is not going where no man has gone before, he is very obviously retreading ground that is now so well worn as to be a positive traffic hazard. In fact his task with “Star Trek” seems to be nothing bolder than to repave the old ground to make it a bit easier for everyone to keep using. This film is motorway maintenance.

Which at least is a blandly constructive job, unlike “X-Men: Origins – Wolverine”, a film so numbingly pointless and destructive of whatever value there might have been left in the X-Men franchise that it makes Disney’s recent purchase of Marvel look like a crazily bad move. Obviously I expected it to be just one long computer simulated fight sequence, stuck on a plane that’s sort of what I wanted. But cinema is only full of violence because violence is inherently dramatic. When men fight there is an implicit drama because one or other could get either badly hurt or killed. Except Wolverine doesn’t feel pain and can’t die. So why am I watching him fight lots of guys who also can’t feel pain and can’t die? If Hugh Jackman’s hairy invulnerability wasn’t tension sappingly dull enough, then the final revelation that he doesn’t remember any of these events anyway would have infuriated me had I been paying enough attention to remember them myself. I’d presumed that somewhere in the mess was some sort of mildly diverting back-story that would explain the character a bit, but since he remembers less of it than I do we could surely all have been spared. As it was I was left rather like Wolverine, a bit tired, a bit confused and not sure what had just happened but knowing that I needed to get away from it.

Sucker for punishment that I am, I also watched “Taken” in a which a clearly deranged Liam Neeson stalks his daughter only to see her kidnapped by the most overtly racist criminal gang that I’ve seen in a film for a decades. Unlike Wolverine, Neeson’s character has not been given superhuman powers or a metal skeleton, however he seems to be completely invulnerable anyway. This again underlined quite how dull an action movie can be when the peril is removed and sadly also proved beyond that doubt that Luc Besson, who really did write this shit, is not coming back to us…

As if trying to push myself to the brink of collapse I then watched “Fast And Furious”. Now, I’ve not seen any of the previous films in this petrol headed franchise and I can’t imagine that I need to. Considering what I’d just watched though, this seemed to be surprisingly good. Vin Desiel has also been touched with the brush of boring invulnerability however the other guy, whose name I can’t even be bothered to look up on IMDB, was allowed to fail and find things a bit hard and suddenly there was a tinge of actual tension. And a character dies! One of the goodies! Amazing. Also, whilst able to peform magic in his car, outside of it Vin stalks around with a look of dim-witted confusion that is strangely moving. He’s like one of the PG tips chimps trying to hold down a normal job. I’m not sure if this an intentional weakness but never the less it worked for me. However the plane landed during the middle of this so I’ll never find out “what happened” in “the end” because I don’t care enough to make any effort to find out. Please don’t try and tell me, I’ll just stare at you in confusion like I don’t know what you’re talking about.