Vanilla Sky is all about alternate lives, now, never, real, imagined, sane, insane, maybe, maybe not.

Vanilla Sky itself has had two lives, first as a Claude Monet painting, then as a Spanish arthouse film, the slippery, elusive Abre los Ochos (Open Your Eyes) by Alejandro Amenabar.

Amenabar went on to make The Others, the ghost story whose filming coincided with the parting of the ways for its leading lady Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise... who just happens to be the star of Vanilla Sky, his first liaison with his new squeeze, smouldering Spaniard Penelope Cruz.

Such is the circular way of these things, Cruz appeared in Abre los Ochos and now reprises that role in Cameron Crowe's faithful cover version of Amenabar's post-modern psychological thriller.

All this is by way of showing that truth is stranger than complex fiction, except that neither you nor Tom Cruise's leading man can be sure what is the truth in Crowe's fantasy horror show.

For definite, Vanilla Sky is unnecessarily longer than the original, even if the length adds to the disorientation, and, for definite too, Vanilla Sky is another Tom Cruise vanity vehicle masquerading as anti-vanity in the manner of Born On The Fourth Of July and Jerry Maguire.

For Cruise, Vanilla Sky presents the chance to mix and match from past performances in the rich playboy role of smug, 33-year-old publishing house heir David Aames. He is one of the Beautiful People, vain, already ugly on the inside, and newly on the outside when his jilted casual sex partner, Julie (Cameron Diaz), takes revenge for his wooing of soulful Spanish dancer Sofia (Cruz). Driving her car off the bridge, Julie kills herself and disfigures David.

Worse is to come for David: arrest for murder; monotonous sessions in prison with an impassive psychologist (Kurt Russell); recourse to a mask; and a loosening of his grip on reality that has him seeing things, as Julie and Sofia begin to interchange.

Put all these components together, and Cruise can dip into his celluloid yesterdays: the need to adjust to a broken body in Born On The Fourth Of July; the pretentious sexual psycho-babble of Stanley Kubrick's dirty-old-man farewell, Eyes Wide Shut; even the masks of the Mission Impossible series. However, he is all surface, out-acted by Jason Lee as his duplicitous best chum, a novelist with the gift of both spin and plain speaking. Diaz, meanwhile, smiles through gritted teeth at playing second fiddle to the burgeoning Cruise-Cruz mutual admiration society.

Almost Famous director Crowe renews his love affair with rock music with a pastiche of a Bob Dylan album cover but it is a laboured in-joke, and elsewhere he lacks the timing, sensuality and suspense of Amenabar and the visual panache of the Coen Brothers or David Lynch - and more of Mr Lynch in a moment.

Vanilla Sky is plain vanilla, a lifeless study of the price of too much undeserved beauty, filmed with similarly empty perfection. Seek out the original or, better still, see Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Updated: 09:15 Friday, January 25, 2002