Gary Sinise stars as a scientist who builds missile systems for Earth's powers that be. At the beginning of the movie, he is accosted by Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays a member of the secret police and is convinced that Sinise is an organically generated cyborg sent by aliens to blow up a prominent politician. Alien impostors are all over the place, you see, and they're hard to detect because they are made of living tissue and designed to think of themselves as real people right up until they detonate.

The situation is pretty interesting, and Impostor could have become a study of totalitarianism while weighing up questions of perception and identity. But as this is a novella spun out to feature length, it instead turns into a dreary series of chases and gunfights. Sinise hides in buildings and runs into corners, while D'Onofrio sniffs around streets with hi-tech tracking devices before screaming, "He's in there! Here's in there! Let's go!"

Chase movies are not intrinsically bad; Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall is a well-respected example of a Philip K. Dick short story adapted into action filmmaking. Impostor doesn't have the visual life of Verhoeven, though; it looks dank, crummy and cheap, with muddy and synthetic objects cluttered about sets and phoney-looking video monitors stuck at the tops and sides for some sort of technological punctuation. Once the movie abandons ideas, it falls flat -- it's not well made enough to engage us with shallowness.

Things go on and on. Sinise runs, D'Onofrio follows, Madeleine Stowe hangs around in the sidelines and bullets fly through the air now and again. We can tell there's going to be a twist ending, but I found it kinda surprising when it came, because there seemed to be two possible twists for the movie to choose between and it ended up going with both of them. The final shot is pretty chilling, but the implications of the final events are annoying -- like the twist at the end of the Blade Runner (again, based on Dick), it's intended as a cool dramatic gimmick but ends up giving credence to the authoritarian arguments the material is supposed to argue against. Sigh.

(Complete review at www.ukcritic.com)

Released by Dimension Films and rated "PG-13" for intense sci-fi violence, some sensuality and language.