Written by Old Bluffer 24th Nov 2005

Dan Smithson, Empath 3rd Class, is a man with a rare gift. His heightened psychic abilities mean he can state the bloody obvious with an accuracy rate of almost 52%.
Show him a room splattered in gore containing a freshly eviscerated corpse and he will mime a scared look and declaim that great violence has occurred, and not too long ago either.
Our personal favourite though is when he is shown an abandoned vehicle that has already been established as the one that their alien quarry, Sil, was using. Our hero sagely speculates that Sil continued on foot, thus ruling out a possible skateboard or pogo-stick chase scenario. He even helpfully predicts the direction, by vaguely gesturing away from the (open) driver's side door.
So, with his paranormal talents firmly established, we eagerly await a scene where he is ripped into Charlatan McNuggets, and it all looks promising when he is given a military grade assault rifle and told to follow Sil into a cavern complex underneath a multi-storey car park. Now any normal civilian would have pointed out that they weren't really trained in subterranean warfare, and perhaps some actual soldiers would be better suited to the task in hand, but no, the overweight empath does his duty, and surely a classic death awaits him?

We need to take a moment here to describe the caverns that someone decided to build a carpark on top of. They are extensive, and are made of the usual Hollywood devised stone where a few torches will light up the entire set so we can see what is happening. Of especial interest is the generous lake of oil in the biggest cave. Now we've heard some cynics claim this is a ludicrous landscape feature, but we'd like to defend the scriptwriters here. Remember there is a carpark above the caves? Well it seems reasonable to us that over the millennia, oil-leaks from poorly maintained vehicles would seep through the stone. A large reservoir of fuel deep below the earth would therefore make perfect sense.

It would of course also make a fantastic fiery inferno for Forrest, and he soon blunders into a newly born alien child, fails to shoot it and ends up hanging precariously over the lake of oil, with Sil hanging onto his ankles.

"Surely now he's going to die!" we thought, hoping for a final quote like "I sense she's angry, she wants to pull me off the ledge!"

Sadly though, the fiery death in the oil is reserved exclusively for Sil and Forrest is hauled to safety, for a lucrative career on the psychic cable TV circuit we're sure.

Despite all our grumbling, we actually enjoyed Forrest Whittaker's portrayal as a Useless Empath and what makes his lack of death even more disappointing is that we don't think he appears in any of the sequels.