Last weekend, my watch stopped mysteriously. Its hands froze, and for two hours or so, time appeared to stand still.

Then, just as mysteriously, it started again.

I glanced down at it during a screening of Forces of Nature, a new romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck, and for a moment I thought it had happened again.

But no. The film is so tedious it just seemed as though the world had stopped.

In fairness, New York and Georgia are an awfully long way apart, and any journey between them is going to be gruelling. But the one at the centre of this story is positively interminable.

Affleck and Bullock are ill-matched travellers thrown together when their plane crashes on takeoff and forced to make the journey by road and rail instead. He's on his way to his own wedding; she must get to Savannah to liquidate some cash from her ex-husband and reconnect with her son.

Ben is not at all sure that marriage is the right course for him, and close exposure to his free-spirited companion makes him waver all the more. The trouble is that the chemistry between the two is roughly akin to that of a dead fish and lard. And the final twist, when it comes (and Lord knows, it's a long time coming) does nothing but bring to mind the old wartime reprimand: Was your journey really necessary?

There are sub-plots concerning an impending hurricane and the hot pursuit of Affleck's fiance Bridget (Maura Tierney) by an old flame. Credibility, which was thin anyway (we are asked to believe that Affleck has a full-time job writing the blurbs on the backs of book jackets) is now strained way beyond its limits.

The lack of any discernible spark between the stars doesn't help, but it's the laboured piling of one unfunny plot twist on top of another that does for Forces of Nature.

First, Ben and Sandra's hire car driver is arrested; then they get on the wrong train; then Sandra's purse is stolen. After half an hour of this, I wanted to stand up in the cinema and scream: GET ON WITH IT!

What's more, the director, Bronwen Hughes, seems interested more in contrived, tricksy shots than in comic timing. As a result, each gag drops to the floor with the aplomb of lead falling off a roof.

Bullock's career of late has been dogged by farragoes like this: Practical Magic, Hope Floats and the risible Speed 2 have all had to be scraped off the floor of the box office. And Affleck, last year's wunderkind who came from nowhere to co-write and co-star in Good Will Hunting, may find his career coming to a flying stop if he continues to promote himself as a romantic lead, in which capacity he has all the charisma of a slice of Spam.

"I think we should just sit here and wait for the locusts to come," he says during one of the film's many longueurs.

They're here, Ben, they're here.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.