Shallow Hal;<br></br> Training Day;<br></br> Nightshift

Superficial? It makes skin-deep look meaty

The paradox of Shallow Hal (12) is that it's the Farrelly brothers' bid to outgrow sophomoric humour – to move from WC to PC – and yet it's more offensive than Dumb and Dumber or There's Something About Maryever was. Its titular hero (Jack Black) is shallow indeed. He'll go out with a woman only if she looks like a Playboy centrefold, regardless of her personality. Then a self-help guru hypnotises him to see "inner beauty" as outer beauty. Anyone with a good heart will have a good figure in his eyes, however plain they might actually be, so he sees Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) as, well, Gwyneth Paltrow, while everyone else sees her as obese. Thanks to a prosthetic fat suit, the audience gets both points of view.

The Farrellies believe Shallow Hal to be their Valentine's card to inner beauty, but the film upholds every prejudice it wants to debunk. It never acknowledges, for instance, that fat people can be attractive just because they're attractve, never mind how beautiful their insides are. The more you look at the movie, the uglier it gets.

It's one thing for me to worry about political incorrectness, but the reason Shallow Hal fails is that the Farrellies are worrying about it too. They've made a comedy that's dependent on bad-taste fat jokes, but because they're afraid to push those jokes too far, the result is tame and apologetic. There's nothing in the same ballpark as the zip scene in There's Something About Mary. When I saw the trailer for Shallow Hal, the whole cinema laughed for two minutes solid. When I saw the film, it was those same two minutes, and those two minutes alone, that got the laughs.

Training Day (18) takes the typical black/ white, veteran/ rookie, by-the-book/ by-the-seat-of-his-pants mismatch of a buddy-buddy cop movie and sharpens its edges. Ethan Hawke is a young Los Angeles policeman who has one day to prove that he's got the right stuff for Denzel Washington's elite narcotics squad. Washington, for once, is not a liberal paragon but a bad mutha who catches drug dealers by behaving as dirtily and illegally as they do. That's how it has to be on the streets, he tells Hawke's character, and because he has such Mephistophelian charisma, and so many snappy lines ("They build jails because of me," he brags of his arrest record), the rookie goes along with him. But as the detective sergeant tears the rulebook into smaller and smaller shreds, Hawke begins to think his boss has crossed the line between pragmatic and psychotic. Lethal Weapon was never as riveting as this.

To label Nightshift (15) a psychological thriller would be to diminish its subtlety and blue-collar realism. Nonetheless, it is almost unbearably thrilling. A rich, penetrating French film, it's a story of bullying among the workers in a glass factory. D-Tox (18) is a snowbound slasher flick starring Sylvester Stallone and some other actors whose careers aren't what they used to be. As quickly as the bodies pile up, you'll wish they'd pile up quicker. The Fluffer (18) is a shaky indie movie about the gay porn industry. And The Hidden Fortress (PG) is another Kurosawa re-release.

n.barber@independent.co.uk