There she is, with her head of buoyant curls, hopeful in jaunty socks, and yet she's creator and guard to such heartless, punitive children Her bewilderment is immense. Then they all bitch and threaten and gaze gloomily at the telly. He raged before, but now feels qualified to rage and chat, and his low-calorie mantras make his housemates feel an almost physical pain. Whenever he starts going on, in his deviously benign voice, about the Magic of Freedom (always the amateur philosopher's favourite topic), Colette aggressively crosses her arms and Mum clutches her stomach His brothers snarl. The boy-men, now in their early thirties, have always been thugs, and the women (headed by Toni Collette) probably always chain-smoked through lemon lips. One of the boys (David Wenham) is just out of prison, where he "read a Science Fiction novel", apparently. However temporarily mature, there's only so much they can take.The Boys (18) is The Parent Trap's inverse It's clever, and cripples delight.

Three brothers live with their tormented women in a Sydney suburb. A butler emerges in blue Y-fronts; the children avert their eyes. The two girls (both played by the freckled Lindsay Lohan) are rational beyond endurance whilst the others rush about shrieking in primary colours. There was always something deliberately respectable about Mills, but in that film, something unselfishly fragile too Her innocence lay in her articulation. Phrases were elided up and then compressed in the haste of emphasis. This gave the original Parent Trap a sweetness, even though it was really a film about separation and tremendous longing. Although the remake is purposefully sillier, it hasn't the moments of openness, the baby-bird gape of the original The only new thing it has to offer is its newness There is an evil girlfriend with a chin, and a Labrador It's pantomime, really.

This must have been a sapping process - acting at brick walls, responding to a performer that's inside your head and scheduled to emerge some time after lunch. In the original film, it was Hayley Mills who played both twins. It has twin 11-year-old girls accidentally reunited after years of separation, plotting to bring their divorced parents (Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson) back together. Hollywood likes its children to be cunning. It often calls on them to bring lovers back together and outwit the vile. A bargain is struck - life will be innocent and delightful if the child can achieve something monumentally adult first.