Monsters, Inc Dir: Peter Docter. Starring: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Tilly, James Coburn, Monsters Inc is fairly cute, mildly amusing film, but not a patch on Toy Story or Shrek. And that's all. Oh. You want more? Fine, but there really is little more to say. It's a nice, fairly amiable piece of cinema, which pulls all the emotional strings you'd expect, but just isn't that great. You'll smile a lot, sure, but as for laughing out loud, well, that's unlikely to happen too often. The story's a little bizarre, but by no means complicated. Set in a world of friendly monsters who use the power of kid's screams to fuel their city, every night they go through various bedroom doors to scare children and collect their screams. Furry giant James P Sullivan (John Goodman) is the top child scarer, and helped out by his friend and roommate Mike Wzowski (Billy Crystal). Unfortunately the city's running low on power, brownouts are a regular event and the crab-like CEO Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn) is starting to panic that he may lose his job. But soon things become far worse when Sullivan accidentally lets a child escape in to his world, and later discovers a plan to kidnap and torture children forever (or for however long they live) The problem is that whilst theirs much to like, the script is just too feel good, and the jokes too predictableas well. Billy Crystal's also partly to blame, about as

O.T.T.as you get in this sort of thing, and more than a little annoying. Steve Buscemi's lead villain is also surprisingly lacklustre, and whilst John Goodman's great (but then when hasn't he been?), it's not enough to save the movie. Unlike Toy Story and Shrek, visually this isn't very interesting either, at least not till the end of the film where the animation department's clearly pulled out all the stops. But there's none of that 'I never knew they could do that' feel which accompanied Shrek, and whilst the characters all look fine, a lot of the time the backdrop is more than a little dull. Jokes on the adult level are sorely missed too  (and no, we don't want anything shocking, just something which works on both levels) and this really is a kids movie. And they'll probably love it. But adult's accompanying them will struggle much more than they usually do with such films. Alex Finch.

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