REVIEW: Disclosure Day - dull, dull, dull and then flickers a little...

A nerdy techie guy goes on the run having stolen a file of information which he is convinced the whole world needs to know about; in response Colin Firth starts spouting incomprehensibly.

Elsewhere, after a bird flutters in through the window, a weather girl starts chatting away in Russian and Korean.

Firth soon ups his game. By sticking sensors to his forehead, apparently he can be anywhere he wants. The weather girl quickly trumps him. She can now look anyone in the eyes and comfortably tell them everything about themselves. Handily, she knows all the top-secret passwords.

Sadly the techie guy doesn’t actually get any more interesting at any point. But he does at least have a moment of insight an hour and a half in when he announces: “I don’t know what is happening.” I am sure most of us are with him on that. Which seems a shame really, 90 minutes in and with the best part of an hour to go.

In the meantime the techie guy and the weather girl have teamed up and are on the run – suspended between the unofficial organisation that wants them to reveal their secret and Firth’s gang that most definitely doesn’t.

But boy, it is ponderous stuff, very slowly going nowhere in particular, the conversations never less than obscure – the way in which Spielberg has determined to underline just how momentous it all is. We are never far from big rooms full of people staring at multiple screens all covered with flickering images and endless data. And if it is not screens we are looking at, it is endless groups of heavy-duty cops preparing to go in, guns at the ready.

With an hour still to go, it’s tempting to pop off to the pub for three-quarters of an hour and come back for the ending.

But don’t. Stick with it, and Disclosure Day does actually get there in the end for a cracking final 20 minutes which really do redeem it to a large extent.

We are in a world where the government is hiding all evidence of aliens crash-landing in their attempts to come and say hello. Worse, a world where the government vivisects the aliens that they actually capture.

And that’s why the opposing gang want the info out there. We have a right to know… apparently. In the middle of it all, and hugely useful to both sides, our heroes on the run have a gift – a gift that they don’t know how to control and don’t know how to use.

But can they make it to Disclosure Day? More pertinently, will we in the audience make it to Disclosure Day? It’s a close-run thing. This is a massively overlong film. Spielberg clearly measures the import of his film by the number of minutes he can keep you there.

But be patient, and it becomes pretty interesting in the end…