So far this year's Blockbuster films have failed to impress

Jason Gardner

I don't ask for much from my summer popcorn fests: Scintillating action sequences, eye-popping special effects, seamless CGI, riveting chase scenes, credible plot twists and characters that make you weep, laugh and dread the moment the credits start rolling. So maybe my standards are a teency bit high but if we can moan when £100,000 a week football stars fluff penalties surely we can gripe when multi-million dollar blockbusters miss the mark too.

Take Spiderman 3 for example. Overlong and overloaded with villains, it ended up with too many character plotlines and not enough streamlined thrills and spills. The first two films successfully built up tension between the hero and his antagonists but this last affair weaved in too many crooks without too much care.

Thankfully the cinema showing Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End included an interval. Much needed for what turned out to be nearly 3 hours of rum swilling, swashbuckling and bizarre storylines. OK so in a series that's featured zombie pirates, shark head sailors and a squid the size of the QE2 I'm not expecting credible but I am expecting a story that makes a little more sense. So we get Cap'n Jack and Cap'n Barbossa all rather too easily raised from the dead and also thrown in to the mix is a voodoo priestess who also happens to be an all powerful sea goddess.

Pirates, gaining its inspiration from a Disney World theme park ride as it did, always had to stave off the threat of becoming a novel idea stretched too thin. It was a dying Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings who said 'I feel like too little butter spread over too much toast.' That could also apply to most of the fare Hollywood is providing us with these days.

Maybe these films are victims of their own success. People don't just want more of the same when it comes to sequels they want bigger, faster, brighter, better. Audience expectations are so high that it's not surprising directors can't match the hype.

Or is it that today's film goers are just far too sophisticated: they can detect any plot hiccup, any jarring effects, any lack of chemistry between leads. Or it could be, and I sincerely hope it's not the case, that filmmakers know that people are hooked to the hype - they don't care if people are actually dismissive of the follow ups as long as they park their rears to see what happens next. Loyalty to the franchise is such that fans will still beat a path to the cinemas, will still buy all the merchandise.

Perhaps that's why such a huge chunk of the budget for films today is spent on marketing. Twentieth Century Fox have just shelled out a fortune to have the image of the Silver Surfer appear amidst the struts of British Airways London Eye in order to promote Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Such bluster usually works - no matter how mixed the reviews for the film as long as the production company ensure that it's an event, a spectacle then the box office coffers will fill up nicely.

So I'll be there, queuing up for a robot invasion from outer space in the upcoming Transformers, or watching Bruce Willis wave a 9MM and a bus pass in Die Hard 4.0 and of course there's the latest instalment of the boy wizard to look forward to. Who knows? Amidst all the fireworks, explosions and slow motion acrobatics there might just be the odd moment of genuine cinema magic. And that's what keeps me hooked.