THESE days we make do with Carrie Bradshaw's lip-gloss platitudes in Sex And The City. In 1948 Professor Alfred Kinsey famously "dropped the atom bomb" with the publication of his book Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male.

Just as Kinsey broke boundaries by lifting the bed clothes on male - and later female - predilections, peccadilloes and practices, so Bill Condon's biopic lifts the covers on the sexual persuasions and proclivities of Kinsey himself.

In hindsight, homosexuality, infidelity and sleaze were bound to filter into his insatiable research, and yet Kinsey had been an enigmatic figure until a series of books and now this warts-and-all film portrait filled in the blanks.

Condon comes not to praise Kinsey or to bury him, but pulls no punches in presenting the story as both drama and documentary, chock full with facts and figures and the least sexy sex on screen since Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls ten years ago. Here it is the stuff of science, not the heart, and you retain the detachment that Kinsey gradually lost.

Played by lookalike Liam Neeson, Kinsey starts out as an appealing character, a pioneering zoology professor in bow tie, tweed suits and spiked hair on a crusade for a sexual revolution, with the support of his equally inquisitive wife (Laura Linney) and his research team. A charismatic knight on the charge, he is light years ahead of students, fellow academics and America's conservative mores alike.

Gradually, however, as Condon introduces more and more characters (in truth too many for the film to flow), a different picture emerges and the early burst of humour dissipates.

Instead of merely recording research, Kinsey blurs the margins between research and personal pleasure by exhorting his researchers to swap partners and filming sexual activities in his attic.

He appears to grow numb to its consequences, playing away from home and rejecting his wife. I say 'appears' because Condon's film becomes increasingly dry and academic itself, with human feelings taking a back seat. In particular, it is not clear how painful or psychologically damaging the research work was for Kinsey's team.

Condon's film doesn't need to be sexier, even if Neeson and Linney are earnest leads, but it could be more daring and provocative. It needed to get its hands dirty instead of becoming bogged down in detail. So much so, I had to check the director's name was Condon not Condom.

Updated: 08:54 Friday, March 04, 2005