Hot dogs star in a canine Cool Runnings

SNOW DOGS: Comedy, PG. Star rating - 2/5

In a classic fish-out-of-water story, a Miami dentist learns he’s been adopted after he inherits his birth mother’s Alaskan dog sled team.

He ventures into the Great White North to find out about where he really came from and ends up getting a little more than he bargains for.

Ted Brooks (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is Miami’s answer to a dental superstar. He’s rich, handsome and has a thriving business called Hot Smiles, inherited from his father. Suddenly, his life changes when he receives a summons from Alaska, naming him in the will of a woman he’s never heard of.

Even though this is the day she dreaded, his mother (Nichelle Nichols) tells him he is adopted and that the deceased woman, Lucy, was his birth mother.

Shell-shocked, Ted boards a plane to Alaska to find out about his bloodline and makes his way to the quirky town of Tolketna. There he meets a group of eccentrics, including the town’s magistrate and pilot George (M Emmet Walsh), the lovely saloon owner Barb (Joanna Bacalso) and crusty mountain man Thunder Jack (James Coburn).

Ted also discovers he has inherited a top team of sled dogs, lead by the huskie Demon, a real sweet-natured dog (sure, with a name like Demon, you’d believe that).

The dogs take an immediate dislike to the city slicker as does as Jack, who would like nothing better than for Ted to hurry back to warmer climates.

Jack badgers Ted to sell him the dogs, but after an interesting turn of events, Ted decides to stick it out in Tolketna and learn all he can about dog sledding, which his mother loved so much.

The kids will love it, but don’t expect too much Disney magic.

THE TIME MACHINE: Action, PG. Star rating: 2/5

HG Wells’ The Time Machine was a seminal work of science fiction.

Imbued with great imagination, it was tinged with sadness and outrage over the fate of humanity.

The film adaptation, sadly, has none of these qualities. It works solely as a generic action-adventure.

In the course of the film, we are treated to some nifty visual effects, lots of big, bad beasts going around terrorising people and a Die Hard-type showdown.

Our hero is Professor Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), who is compelled to build a time machine to avert a tragedy in his past. With it, he our resourceful scientist travels back to the day of the incident, but finds the situation unalterable.

Resigned to this, fact that the answer he seeks cannot be found in the past, he travels ahead in time and meets the future descendants of mankind: the Eloi and the Morlocks.

First, the good: The time travel sequences are stunning. We see the progress of the seasons, human civilisation and even geologic processes.

There is visually inspiring moment where day and night blur into one, producing a narrow, wavering band of light in the sky. These sights alone, however, are insufficient to evoke wonder.

In the book, the Time Traveller is driven by relentless curiosity. He journeyed to the very last days of the Earth, described by a narrative at once pensive and poignant.

But in this film, the hero’s primary motivation seems to be women. Guy Pearce seems listless throughout, as if unable to believe in such a preposterous exercise.

His first pit stop is New York in 2030, where he gets acquainted with a virtual librarian who embodies the sum of human knowledge.

Strangely enough, it knows nothing of time travel theories. Some 28 years into the future and a repository of information knows less than Google.com? And this is progress? Hmm.

The latter part of the film suffers from this same lack of logic. And imagination. It’s annoying that humans still speak perfect American English so far in the future. Even the nature of the Eloi contradicts the principle of evolution.