Latest video: Wrecking havoc

By Ewan McDonald

Pod racers in Star Wars? Sooks. Chariot racers in Ben Hur? Wimps. What a bloke wants when he goes to the movies is a car chase. A road-code-bending, pedestrian-scattering, panelbeater's delight.

Middle-aged men's eyes still go misty at the memory of Steve McQueen's motorised rampage through San Francisco in Bullitt. That one ran the red lights in 1969 and connoisseurs of the genre will tell you it hasn't been bettered in 30 years.

Until Ronin, maybe. More than 80 cars - real metal ones, not digitised Apple Mac ones - were written off in the making of the Robert De Niro thriller. They bounce off cobblestones in the back streets of Nice and tunnels under the Seine in Paris (someone with a wry sense of humour has placed the odd little Fiat among the big black Mercedes there) as well as the occasional uncompleted motorway bridge.

Which is a pity because, apart from littering the scenery of several French towns and arondissements, the cars tend to get in the way of a very good thriller, released for rental this week.

Six strangers - experts in weapons, surveillance and covert operations - meet in a musty warehouse in the heart of Paris. Spies and soldiers during the Cold War, they now have no jobs and no loyalties, except to whoever is paying them at the time.

Sam (De Niro) is experienced in weapons and battle strategy. The others include driver Larry (Skipp Sudduth), also an American; English weapons specialist Spence (Sean Bean); Eastern bloc electronics whizz Gregor (Stellar Skarsgard); Vincent (Jean Reno), the French coordinator; and Deirdre (Natascha McElhone), the client's only contact with the group.

They have been hired to steal a mysterious but well-protected briefcase from a shadowy figure in Paris. No one knows the identity of their employer, the true motives of anyone else in the group, how many organisations are involved in the hunt or the contents of the case. But some will die for the case and all will kill for it.

Filmed throughout France, with an ensemble of European and American actors, Ronin presents an interesting contrast to most Hollywood blockbusters in that not everything - not all the background to the characters, their motives, their quarry - is explained.

But in the end director John Frankenheimer settles for lotsa guns, lotsa bodies and lotsa car crashes. Ram 'er into overdrive and damn the subtlety.

Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, Billy the Kid and their mates are enjoying a well-deserved retirement from gunslinging in a little town in the untamed West, a place where neither the sheriff nor his deputy carry a gun, where there's not even a jail.

Scratch the above. The outlaws hate the place. It's called Purgatory, the bylaws positively promote shootin', carousin' and bad blood, and the lads can't join in because they're being forced to undo their violent pasts. Worse than that, they're all dead.

But when Blackjack and his ornery gang ride into town, the good ol' boys have one last chance at immortality.

This is Purgatory, in which cowboy legend meets the supernatural, its star cast including Sam Shepard, Eric Roberts, Randy Quaid, Donnie Wahlberg and folksinger-turned-actor John David Souther.

And the film? Oh, that's purgatory too.