Diana

Has there ever been a movie that so quickly plummeted from 'potential Oscar contender' to 'absolute train-wreck' as Diana? What should have been this year's version of The Iron Lady has been tarred and feathered by early reviews, with some parts of the world cutting short the cinema run, or cutting it out completely, in lieu of a much cheaper direct-to-DVD release. But can it really be all that bad? Unfortunately, yes.

Focusing on the part of her life that begins at the tail-end of her marriage to Prince Charles (who we never see on screen), we meet Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) right before she meets Dr. Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews), and they promptly fall in love. However, with Diana constantly in the public light, Khan sees their relationship presenting a potential problem for his career as a surgeon. Can he look past the circus that follows this princess around everywhere she goes and notice that she is just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her?

Yes, this is pretty much a carbon copy of the plot of Notting Hill, except that Julia Robert's superstar has been replaced by what appears to be a borderline psychotic member of the royal family. Too often she comes across as a spoiled, bi-polar harpy with some severe boundary issues. Try as Watts might to bring some gravitas to the role, the script almost completely hobbles her from the beginning, and during one break-up scene, she appears to be channeling Elizabeth Berkley's school of acting in Showgirls.

Andrews comes off even worse, dealt the short straw with some of the worst dialogue ever committed to the big screen ('Sometimes I think I'm not performing surgery, but that the surgery is performing me'), and while Hirschbiegel manages to include some genuinely impressive cinematography, he directs the whole movie like it's two shades away from being a Fatal Attraction-type horror.

Considering the breadth and depth of Diana’s actual life, this movie isn't just bad, it's unusually bad. The kind of bad you almost want to recommend people to watch, so you can talk about it afterwards. Almost.