Star Trek - rest in peace. Please.

The latest instalment in the long-running sci-fi franchise, Star Trek: Nemesis, is a slight bit better than the embarrassing 1998 entry, Insurrection, but saying that is like stating that getting punched in the stomach is better than getting kicked there.

As the film opens, the Romulan race wants peace with the Federation. Of course, there is someone or something out there to muck that up. Ordered by Starfleet to be the first line of diplomacy in ushering in a new era, the crew of the USS Enterprise is dispatched to Romulus. Once there, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the Enterprise crew find themselves at the center of a plot involving the destruction of Earth at the hands of Shinzon (Tom Hardy), a new nemesis who also happens to be a clone of Picard.

Nemesis showed the promise of potential, namely when it came to the prospect of Picard facing off against a variation of him in order to save the day. Yet, like so much in John Logan's lame screenplay and Stuart Baird's listless direction, nothing is fully developed. The crew members are given little to do, the action scenes are delivered with all the expertise and finesse of an old episode of The A-Team and the most menacing thing about the movie's villain are his teeth. Even the "death" of one of the main characters lacks any sort of emotional punch. Logan and Baird attempted to take the best elements of Star Trek II, IV and First Contact to make a kick-ass entry into the series. Instead, what we get is a motionless bore that mostly resembles the joke that is Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

One of the things one could look forward to in a Star Trek film, at least the ones featuring the original crew (you know, the good films), was the camaraderie among the cast. You got a sense of welcome familiarity from seeing them again in each new installment. Rare have I experienced that with the Next Generation crew, the exception being First Contact. I have enjoyed Patrick Stewart as Picard simply because I enjoy Patrick Stewart as an actor. He can take crappy dialogue and deliver it with dignity. Case in point: this film. Even with the game effort put forward here, he looks as bored as the rest of the actors. Everyone seems to have come down with the "easy payday" syndrome here.

It's sad that the Star Trek film series may finish not with a bang but with a whimper and a yawn. If this is the best that the filmmakers can come up with after a four-year hiatus, then calling it a day may be the most satisfying thing to come out of this mess.

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