TREVOR Nunn and John Caird took nine hours to tell Dickens' tale in the RSC's famous 1991 stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Plenty to cut out then for American writer-director Douglas McGrath as he gives this most English of tales the Hollywood gloss, just as he did with Jane Austen's Emma in 1996.

He streamlines young Nickleby's travails to 133 minutes, trim although not so trim as Alberto Cavalcanti's 107-minute film version in 1947.

It is what you choose to do in those two condensed hours that counts, and McGrath gives Dickens the chocolate box treatment: ridiculously spotless Victorian London streets; grotesque, gloomy, gothic Yorkshire; and lovely, happy, country garden finish.

The casting of Queer As Folk's Charlie Hunnam as Nicholas Nickleby says it all: flowing Beckham locks, perfect blue eyes and, like Mick Jagger on Stones duty, never a mark on his dandy frock coat as he strikes the virtuous, wounded romantic. He is more pin-up looks than substance, his acting blond-bland if sincere, and his accent is a strange conflation of Geordie past and Hollywood present wrapped inside a failed attempt to sound quite the English gentleman.

Left penniless by his ruinous late father, Nickleby, his mother and too-too pretty sister (Romola Garai) are reduced to begging favours off bitter, wicked Uncle Ralph (a magnificently, monstrously arch Christopher Plummer).

This sadistic moneylender amuses himself by dumping Nickleby on the Dotheboys orphanage in Yorkshire and the outrageous schooling methods of Wackford Squeers (a one-eyed Jim Broadbent) and his scarier-than-Christine-Hamilton wife (Juliet Stevenson, loving every twisted comic moment).

So begin the movie's two parallel journeys: Nickleby fleeing with the crippled Smike (Jamie Bell's sensitive crushed flower) on a mission to restore his family, and Uncle Ralph doing his utmost to squash him.

The greater pleasures lie in the rogues gallery of Dickensian cameos, some naughty, others nutty. The best of British - Broadbent's gargoyle, Tom Courtenay's droll Newman Noggs, Edward Fox's old lecher - are joined by American Nathan Lane's eloquent theatrical impresario Vincent Crummles and Australian Barry Humphries in Dame Edna Everage mode as Mrs Crummles.

Polish without the spit.

Updated: 10:10 Friday, June 27, 2003