Hit me Obi one more time

The script's clunky, the acting's appalling and Jar Jar Binks is still alive - but it all comes together in the end, says Peter Bradshaw

Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones ***
Dir: George Lucas
With: Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L Jackson, Pernilla August, Jack Thompson, Christopher Lee
143 mins, cert U

First, the bad news, and what devastatingly bad news it is. Jar Jar Binks has been brought back for Episode II, presumably in a last-ditch attempt to shift millions of tons of dolls. Unrepentant, producer-director George Lucas has declared that Jar Jar stays in the picture, but pointedly gives him a more high-status role: speaking in the senate, even proposing historic changes to the constitution. Even worse news is that Tattooine's insidious Faginesque slave-trader is back too, hook-nose and all, shruggingly revealing that he has sold Anakin Skywalker's mother. He actually says the words: "Business is business." Oy.

The dialogue is every bit as clunky as we come to have to expect from the great man (despite a co-writing credit for Jonathan Hales), and however state-of-the-art his effects are, when it comes to nouns, adjectives, conjunctions and the like, Mr Lucas has got out his trusty crayon. Sadly many of the performances marry up to this writing style in an ecstatic merger of form and content. Natalie Portman, a mere bud of dullness in Phantom Menace, has blossomed into a fully-formed flower of bad acting here, her head and ears winsomely framed in a different outlandish post-Leia hairstyle in every scene.

Hayden Christensen is the actor who has been chosen to play Anakin Skywalker, and on his shoulders rests the burden of showing the moral complexity of the entire epic: how this profoundly gifted Jedi warrior should have turned to the dark side. Unfortunately, Christensen's armoury of facial expressions is modestly stocked. Moreover, Anakin not only has a ponytail, but also a thin length of braided hair trailing winsomely over his shoulder. As the mighty Yoda would say: "Like a wussy 12-year-old girl he looks."

The good news is that the effects unleashed by the geniuses of Industrial Light and Magic really are remarkable - more than 100 gobsmacking, jawdropping set pieces, too intricate and detailed to describe here. On this front, Episode II delivers in a very big way.

Where this movie comes alive is in its final act, the closing hour or so of this slightly stately two-hour-23-minute film. And it comes to life when the forces of Good and Evil unveil themselves, unambiguously, for a big showdown. Specifically, the excitement kicks in with the appearance of Christopher Lee as the sinister renegade Jedi Count Dooku - a character uncannily similar in function to Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, even down to the thrilling mano-a-mano contest he has with Yoda, like the Gandalf confrontation. When Lee comes on, the film's IQ seems to treble, and it's a pleasure and a relief to see an actor who both enjoys what he is doing and is old enough to shave.

The plot turns on a secessionist drama: solar systems are threatening to break away from the Galactic Republic, with Dooku behind it, along with the shadowy and superbly named Darth Sidious. (Who else? Darth Nuendo? Darth Vasion? Darth Tergalactic-Warfare?) A civil war is brewing, but not like the American civil war. The wise heads and Jedi Knights in charge of the Republic do not, apparently, have a problem with slavery.

This plot is tied up with assassination attempts on the inexpressibly lovely Padme Amidala (Portman), so the Republic assigns two Jedis to protect her: the smitten Ani (Christensen), and his mentor Ewan McGregor who is still playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the same boring stuffy backdated-Alec Guinness way. "Why do I get the feeling that you're going to be the death of me?" says Kenobi to his young charge, and there is a frisson all over the cinema.

For the headstrong, mercurial young Ani Skywalker is already showing signs of the evil about to grow in him. The death of his mother triggers a terrible murderous rage in Ani - let down, sadly, by Christiansen's pouting face which suggests more than anything else the orphanhood of Bambi. Can it be long before he starts trying the fast, jerky stride invented by Dave Prowse for Episode IV, like a baby taking its first steps?

The rest of Lucas's storyline is very involved. The "clones" of the title are a genetically engineered army secretly commissioned for the Republic's defence, but whose existence is covered up a sinister convocation of plotters. Obi-Wan gets a rainswept fight scene with bounty hunter Jango Fett, during which everyone around me in the auditorium was stifling yawns.

But however indulgent and wayward it all is, the strands are pulled together for a rousing finale in which the only real disappointment is the reappearance of R2-D2 and C-3PO, who used to have one of the great comic double-acts in modern cinema history, and now are just minor, and pretty straight, supporting players.

This movie is an improvement on the execrable Phantom Menace: never less than a watchable, entertaining spectacle. Its attempt at complexity and ambiguity is engaging, even admirable, although this is partly still the contrived "prequel" effect of creating storylines which have to look startling and unexpected, even though we all know where they're heading.

Everything now hinges on Episode III, which will be boxed in by the films either side. Can the callow Christensen make Ani's Luciferian conversion to evil look convincing? Does Lucas have the courage to make this temporary triumph of evil look as resounding as it needs to be? Realistically, Episode III is where the great epic will end in the public mind - with the victory of the Dark Force. Will Lucas have the nerve not to insist on some cop-out way of sugaring this pill? I fear the worst, but Episode II is enjoyable stuff, and a new, if short-lived, hope.

Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones is released next Thursday.