Tuesday is the one day of the week that I can actually afford to go to the movies, thanks to cheap ticket day at my local moving picture projection house. So on Tuesday I tend to go a little nuts, which is surprising considering the fact that most movies these days suck inordinate quantities of dick. Still, it's the only way that I can find to escape my day to day life, which is on average considerably worse.

That's good news for you however! Because thanks to the magic of the internet I can warn you ahead of time so that you don't make the same mistakes that I frequently do. So without further ado, here's the list of all the shit I subjected myself to this week.

You know this is going to be terrible within the first five minutes, when Mark Wahlberg sits in a sniper's nest with a bright-eyed young buddy, popping off African militants in a warzone. The expendable no-name actor turns to Wahlberg and hands him a photograph of a pretty young women, saying something about how happy he's going to be when he gets back home to see his wife. I think that was the point at which I worked out the entire plot of this film from beginning to end, and I could have quite happily walked out of the theatre right then, satisfied that I just saved myself two hours of footage stitched together from every action film I'd ever seen.

By the way, who the hell green-lighted the decision to name Wahlberg's Jason-Bourne-esque character Bob Lee Swagger? I can just see the screenwriter reading a scene from his script to his six-year-old daughter and asking her what the sniper's name should be. Bob Lee Swagger came up in the top-five best suggestions, narrowly beating Professor Titsy O'Pop and Jonathan Livingston Buttcrack. In fact, the entire movie looks like it was written in dot-point form on the back of a napkin by an out-of-work Hollywood vagrant in a train carriage who only knew that he was kinda vaguely going for a movie about a dude who shoots a bunch of people and the rest is just details. There's sort of almost a plot that starts to develop mid-way through about corrupt politicians and how we all know that oil turns them into bloodthirsty tyrants.

Really the only reason I saw this at all is because of a scene in the trailer where a guy presses a trigger and a 747 explodes in the background. I thought that was pretty cool. Imagine my surprise when I realise that they've actually removed that entire scene from the film. Now, besides the fact that they seem to have left the only marginally interesting scene in the whole movie on the cutting-room floor, it makes me wonder how much more of the movie they had to cut out just to avoid any reference to any of the events leading up to, or resulting from, a guy blowing up a motherfucking aeroplane. Seriously, that would have been the most significant event in the entire movie, not to mention expensive. And why did they remove it? So they could fit in another fifteen minutes worth of Mark Wahlberg tending his wounds and wincing a lot?

It's clear to see how far Bruce Willis' career has fallen when he's willing to star in a movie alongside Halle Berry. Seriously, at this point I'm shocked that people continue to consider, let alone cast, Halle Berry in any kind of movie about anything. I know she won an Oscar. I know she has great tits. I also know that trying to watch her act is like uncomfortably watching your kids perform in a primary school play and try to pretend they're going to be the next Brando. It's embarrassing. What's more embarrassing is that they keep rehashing the same awful "Who's the real killer?? It's not who you think!!" storyline as though it worked the first time. It didn't.

First of all, the killer is who I think it is. That's because I've seen this paint-by-numbers murder mystery twisty-turny bullshit so many times that I can just skip past all the red herrings and go straight to the punchline. The only saving grace is that none of the main characters turn out to be imaginary, nor do they come back as ghosts.

What it all comes down to is that Halle Berry already did this in Gothika, and she hasn't gotten any better at it. Bruce Willis is hideously miscast as a short-tempered millionaire advertising entrepreneur whose job is simply to be sleazy and make a feeble attempt to distract you from the unbelievably predictable plot. Giovanni Ribisi, who is about as ugly as a hat full of arse, is the creepy computer-hacking geek whose job is also to be sleazy and distracting. All in all, this plays out like an instruction manual of suck. The filmmakers know that the only thing they really have going for them here is some fleeting glimpses of the side of Halle's tit, so they've packed in plenty. Fortunately you can spend six seconds on Google Image Search for a much better result.

Ah, David Fincher, the mastermind behind Seven and Fight Club, two movies so hip and critically acclaimed that they've both gone full circle and become the most annoying things to ever happen in the latter half of the 20th Century. I blame young people. So is it any wonder that Fincher wanted to take a bit of time off from the movie making gig - say, a decade - before making his long awaited return? After watching the trailer you might be led into believing that Dave has come back to his Seven roots, with a chilling biopic of the real-life Zodiac Killer who terrorised California in the '70s.

You'd be wrong, because what Fincher has actually created is a three-hour long Law and Order episode.

You know, there's a good reason these awful cop-shop murder mystery television shows only last forty minutes without ads. That's because dry, clinical police procedure doesn't work for three hours. In fact, in this busy MTV generation of short attention spans, it's damn near impossible to find anything that works for three hours, let alone a bunch of serious-looking cops questioning suspects, following leads and gathering clues. It's interesting and insightful for a little while, but after ninety minutes you start looking around the cinema, searching for something to do to pass the time. You see the characters making revelation after revelation, each time doing that camera close-up "Holy shit I've solved it" shot, and each time being completely wrong. And of course, if you know anything about serial killers, you know that they never actually caught the goddamn Zodiac. So you morbidly realise that all you're seeing is three hours worth of cops not solving murders. And after that time they seem to realise that they've run out of film and money, so they just scroll ten minutes' worth of text onto the screen basically explaining Well, this other guy tried to solve it but that didn't work out, and then this other bunch of people tried to solve it but nope, that didn't work either, and then they closed the case and then opened it again and they still couldn't find the killer and guess what, they still haven't fucking solved it.

In fact, after seeing this, all I can think is that it's amazing the cops of the 1970s ever solved a single damned thing, ever. They just sit around somewhat awkwardly in their plaid jackets and bow ties with their clickety-clackity typewriters, shrugging and saying "Well gosh, murder you say? Well I guess we should, I dunno, get some fingerprints or something, or like, run a handwriting analysis on somebody. I dunno." Considering the Zodiac Killer was never exactly what you'd call a criminal genius. One can't help but think that if 9/11 had happened thirty years earlier then we'd all be speaking Arabic now.