IN THE late 1980s, Demi Moore was commanding a higher salary than any actress in Hollywood. Kevin Costner's career was in the ascendancy. William Hurt had won an Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman. And the team of Bruce A Evans and Raynold Gideon had written the engaging screenplays for Starmanand Stand By Me.

Those were the days. Now the three actors have fallen far off the A-list and have been reduced to appearing in a movie as nonsensical as Mr Brooks, scripted by Evans and Gideon.

Costner plays the title role, a successful businessman devoted to his wife and daughter and so respected in his Portland, Oregon community that he has been proclaimed Man of the Year. But Brooks leads a secret life as a serial killer. He is addicted to targeting strangers and gets such a thrill from killing that he almost swoons with pleasure.

Brooks is egged on by an alter ego (Hurt) he names Marshall. Nobody can else can see or hear Marshall, but, in one of the movie's silliest lines, Marshall declares "I like being alive!"

Moore plays Tracy Atwood, the remarkably intuitive detective on Brooks's trail, noting his modus operandi for killing couples having sex, rearranging their bodies to take photographs, retrieving the bullets and vacuuming the room afterwards. "What if they don't have a vacuum cleaner?" asks Atwood's sidekick in one of the few amusing lines in the film.

Atwood has other problems. An escaped prisoner is on the loose and intent on killing her for putting him away. And as a multimillionaire heir with a penchant for younger men, Atwood is in the throes of a very costly divorce from her husband.

The leading actors struggle vainly to bring these absurdly implausible characters to life. Co-writer Evans is in the director's chair for the first time since his entirely forgettable debut with Kuffs (1992). His new film aspires to being clever and quirky, but nothing can conceal its sheer daftness as it crawls along interminably, devoid of wit, pace or tension. MICHAEL DWYER