cinema

Just Cause is a pretentious thriller, a terrible movie, a mess, but it does have (a drum roll and a long, low meaningful moan please)... Sean Connery (right).

Oh Sean Sean Sean... what can I say, particularly with this much drool flooding my mouth? There are millions of us movie goers - women, men and those who just can't make up their minds - who'll endure such crud as A Good Man in Africa, Medicine Man and Rising Sun simply to worship Sean, that great big bear of an indisputably heterosexual hero.

Okay, okay, so he beat up on wife Diane Cliento, and that's weak and rotten, but sometimes cruel reality can inform celluloid image in odd, unexpected ways that natural revulsion and political correctness cannot account for. The Connery we know is indeed defiantly masculine and sexually unreconstructed - consider, for an eerie moment, the number of women Connery has slapped, punched and generally roughed up on screen - yet it's that faint whiff of sexual fascism (will he kiss me or slap me?) that, like it or not, excites. In the realm of fantasy, that is - fantasy doesn't play by the rules.

It worked for Gable, too, and unlike Gable, Connery hasn't dated. He's a true primitive who hasn't had to modernise his appeal; he's made the movies - and the world - adapt to him. Yes, age has smoothed the rough trade edges and maybe even mellowed the sexual derring-do, but Sean Connery still reigns as Cinema's Most Charming Cave Man. By rights he ought to be extinct, but like I said, fantasy doesn't play by the rules, not even the rules of evolution.