ONCE again, I'm forced to play the bad guy, having made the mistake of being overly enthusiastic about a film before I saw it, and now having to relay the bad news to the audience.

Yes, folks, I'm afraid the much-anticipated and massively hyped Love Actually is actually pants.

Let's not forget that although writer/director Richard Curtis is an erstwhile genius, having written Blackadder, he simultaneously has the potential to produce complete dross - just take that line at the end of Four Weddings and A Funeral - "Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed". Retch.

Unfortunately, it is this over-sentimental trait and his frankly unrealistic grasp of the English language which have been given free rein over two hours and 15 minutes of the most disgustingly populist and clichd rom-com of recent memory.

Love Actually thinks it is presenting different loves for our dissection - married, unrequited, adulterous, parental, between siblings and so on. There's a bride, a prime minister, a set of porn actors, and what feels like a few thousand more severely underdeveloped characters (all played by very famous actors indeed) who go about their business five weeks before Christmas - the segmentation echoing his use of the weddings and funeral to split the tedium in that blockbuster.

But, in fact, that's not the only element of this film that we feel we've seen a bizillion times previously. It begins with the listed swearing incident Curtis always uses, and Hugh Grant, who seems as if he writes all his own lines anyway, totters around saying "Right" unconvincingly, playing the same charmer he always does.

The rest of the actors perform with variable levels of success - Martine McCutcheon has a pair of Hollywood gnashers, meaning that from the moment she smiles she looks no more like a tea lady from "Landan Taown" than J-Lo would. Laura Linney's plot is outrageously bad - she receives constant calls from a brother in a secure mental facility. How the heck would he be allowed a phone?

My own few moments of enjoyment came solely thanks to brilliant Bill Nighy as the washed-up rock star, and Keira Knightley and Andrew Lincoln's very brief interlude - a waste of both of them.

Curtis even feels the need to add a myriad of celebrity appearances, just in case we lose interest. There's a nasty taste in the mouth with the Rickman/Thompson infidelity story, and the snide, unrealistic comments about McCutcheon's weight.

It's just smug, pat, middle-class sentiment shoved down your throat to a soundtrack featuring Dido, Norah Jones and the disco classic, Jump.

Curtis has always seemed to pander to the other side of the Atlantic. Now it has come to an icky, sappy and ludicrous climax, wherein people who seem to exchange no more than two glances are purported to be in love, and where not one of the stories ends either realistically or satisfactorily.

What a shallow and obvious disappointment, actually.