A Cirque to irk

Just as Les Mis was soaringly monotonous, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (3D) is soaringly pointless. No point to it whatsoever. I looked. I looked everywhere for a point, even under my cinema seat. (That’s how desperate I was.) But I came up empty-handed. It’s 90 minutes of sheer, total, utter pointlessness, as written and directed by Andrew Adamson (who directed the first two Shreks and the first two Chronicles of Narnia) and produced by James Cameron, who has made some good films, and Titanic. God knows what they were thinking of when they embarked on this. And boredom doesn’t even come near it. I experienced the sort of boredom that is also a seething rage spread thin. What am I doing here? When’s it going to end? Why did anyone imagine this was even a film? Enough with the trapezing and trampolining and roller-skating and diving already. What shall we have for out tea tonight? This Cirque irks.

A bit of background: Cirque du Soleil, a Canadian entertainment company founded in 1984 as ‘a mix of circus acts and entertainment arts’, is now a phenomenon with spin-offs playing all over the world and almost continually in Las Vegas. It is breathtakingly thrilling live but that’s what it is: a live experience. Seeing a Cirque du Soleil film makes about as much sense as going to the cinema to see…I don’t know…a group of people having dinner at El Bulli, and then imagining you ate there. A narrative is imposed, but it’s so bland and so obviously imposed, it’s pathetic, as well as pointless in and of itself. (I even turned out my pockets, but nothing, nada, nowt.)

Here is the story, for what it’s worth, and because I have to fill the rest of this space with words, or I’m for it: so, a young woman (Erica Linz) with short hair and big eyes and a simpering look, and wearing a Dorothy-from-Oz-type frock, which is surely too childish for her, attends some kind of fairground carnival where a scary clown (is there any other type?) gives her a flyer for ‘The Aerialist’.