Samantha Morton is a genius of an actress, but even she can't save this overblown mess, a would-be revisionist epic set in colonial New Zealand that combines the worst sort of Mills and Boon melodrama with endless gory battles and landscape porn.

Morton, as it happens, had huge run-ins with director Vincent Ward.

During a difficult shoot, she got ill, Ward got the elbow, but was then re-hired for the edit. Lots of classic films have had similarly turbulent production histories (Gone With the Wind, for example) but this ain't no classic.

As Sarah O'Brien, a passionate Irishwoman trying to track down her half-Maori son, Morton looks pale and uninterested. Sarah gets taken "up river" by a Maori tribe so she can heal their leader of flu, falls in love with her son's uncle and gets annoyed because the Maoris kill some whites. "This is all wrong," she shouts. "Everything is wrong!"

Kiefer Sutherland, meanwhile - as the poetic soldier who loves her - wanders around like lost luggage.

The sight of his naked bottom is just one of many unpleasant surprises and Celtic caterwauling, plastered willy-nilly over the action, is the final insult.

It comes as no surprise to learn that local Maoris put a curse on the production. Unlike their ancestors, they seem to have won the day.