In a year chalk full of fast food cinema here comes Red Planet, a harmless, special effects heavy picture, in which nothing very surprising finds its way to the screen.

In this futuristic science fiction film, Earth is all but destroyed, so the only hope for the human race rests on the possibility of colonizing Mars. A crew is sent to the Red Planet to prep it for living conditions. Of course when our intrepid heroes get to the Red Planet, all hell breaks loose. The team consists of Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Terence Stamp, Simon Baker, and Carrie-Anne Moss. Moss stays aboard the ship as the others journey to the planet's surface where they encounter a government issued robot that has gone haywire.

There are certainly echoes of that "other" Mars picture, Mission to Mars which came out earlier this year. Thankfully, Red Planet is nowhere near as heavy handed as the laughable Brian DePalma opus. No, this picture goes for obvious storytelling and calculated thrills as our crew desperately tries to out wit a killer android and escape certain doom.

The performances are decent enough, most notably Sizemore, who manages to get off a couple of smart ass zingers. Kilmer and the rest of the cast are just sort of there--playing it by the numbers. The special effects are convincing enough, although hardly groundbreaking.

The director is Anthony Hoffman who, like so many other directors in the past few years, got his start doing commercials. He directs Red Planet at a brisk pace but with so few surprises, that I got quite bored. In the end, Red Planet is just another in a long line of films that opts to play it safe.