Dir:

Wally Pfister

With: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman

Runtime: 119 minutes

IT does not take the combined computing power of Google and Microsoft to pinpoint the first and last time computers were exciting on a movie screen. It was 1983, WarGames, and Matthew Broderick was typing into an ancient, green-screened machine the words, "Let's play Global Thermonuclear War".

Back then, it took the threat of planetary annihilation to distract the audience from the lethally boring presence of grey plastic boxes that were not tellies. Techniques have since become more sophisticated. The smartest move made by director David Fincher in The Social Network, for instance, was to keep computers off the screen as much as possible and rely on good old-fashioned humans for drama.

WarGames or a Zuckerberg biopic, the same rules apply: computer screens and the big screen go together like sex and socks. As if to prove that, along comes Johnny Depp in Transcendence, a science fiction thriller so dull it makes the drying of paint look like the execution of a Pollock painting.

On the plus side, Transcendence is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, the Oscar-winning cinematographer on Inception, Moneyball, and The Dark Knight, so it looks the business, at least in the opening scenes. These show a post-industrial California in which society has gone back to basics, with no internet and nary a pint of milk to be had in the local shops.

Cut to several years before and the first sign that Pfister's movie is unwisely pitching for serious ground. Yes, behold the sight of Mr Depp wearing Gregory Pecks to signal he is a brainy type. Very fetching the specs are, too, in tortoiseshell. How clever to find a style in keeping with the film's pace.

Depp plays Will Caster, a specialist in artificial intelligence. Will wants to create machines that can transcend the normal limits of computers. Such machines, being self-aware and mega intelligent, would be smart enough to end poverty, heal the planet, and cure the sick. Some of us would settle for simply being able to set up an out of office reply, but that's Hollywood ambition for you.

Will is married to Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friends with fellow scientist Max (Paul Bettany). Although Will is so popular he features on the covers of glossy magazines, not everyone is keen on the thought of computers taking over from humans. One group in particular, the Revolutionary Independence From Technology movement, aka RIFT (cue burp of laughter from Scottish audiences) is so against the idea it sets out to destroy the project.

Thus the stage is set for a battle between mortals and machines that ought to be exciting but is not.

For a start, courtesy of the film's opener, we know how the story will pan out. There is nothing like giving away an ending for draining the life out of a picture.

All of which makes it doubly imperative that the characters and the story are engaging enough to power the movie along. The audience has to feel as though something, anything, is at stake. Otherwise, all concerned are simply going through the motions. So it turns out.

Hall, playing the anguished wife, and Bettany, the friend fretting over the crossing of ethical lines, look at home when the film calls for a spot of drama, but both look uncomfortable in the action scenes.

The entire film breaks out in a sweat when it comes to juicing things up, as though it has been forced to include such vulgarities as explosions and car chases when it would prefer to let the cameras linger on computer screens filling up with reams of code, or have lab-coated types spouting pseudo-scientific guff at each other. In the absence of the latter, any old tired line will do, such as, "People fear what they do not understand". No, they fear being so bored they start gnawing their own limbs.

Depp is in tune with the mood of alienation in as much as he seems to be only half present during the movie. Perhaps it is an extreme reaction to all that chewing the scenery he does in the Pirates Of The Caribbean films. Either way, he is not so much phoning in a performance as emailing it.

That both director and writer are making their feature debuts partly accounts for the sluggish pacing and the haphazard style, but none of this excuses Depp's lacklustre performance. In a film that centres around computers, it is even more essential that the film's star does what stars are meant to do - add pep, light up the screen, give the audience some razzle dazzle. Depp looks as though he is in sleep mode.

As if waking up to its shortcomings, Transcendence goes all out at the end to make up for the lack of action, but by then it is too late. Maybe if Pfister had turned his film off and then on again he could have salvaged something. As it is, Transcendence is stuck on off.