My Sister's Keeper (12A)

IN the week that she got her star on the Walk of Fame, it's an achievement, of sorts. Cameron Diaz has made a film about a 14-year-old girl with a terminal illness . . . and it's about as emotional as watching Spock play Sudoku.

Good or bad, films about dying relatives can normally be relied upon to get you blubbing. But after the curtain went down on this vapid junk, there wasn't a moist eye in the house.

My Sister's Keeper is about Kate Fitzgerald (Sofia Vassilieva from TV series Medium), a teenage girl with leukaemia. In a bid to save her life, Kate's doting parents Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric) have had another baby, Anna (Abigail Breslin), to act as a stem cell, organ and tissue donor. It's a set-up that leaves the door open for an intelligent tearjerker.

Instead, the film goes for a horrible, romcom-style multi-plot structure, that could have comes out like some binned Richard Curtis script called Cancer, Actually.

One strand sees Anna - at the grand old age of ELEVEN - taking legal advice from hotshot solicitor Alec Baldwin and suing her mum because she wants to stop a planned kidney transplant. That might sound far-fetched but, since the script makes Anna talk like a 42-year-old accountant, you'll just about buy it.

This movie cheapens the experience of a family struggling to come to terms with the impending loss of a loved one. Cry? I very nearly did. Just not in the way Cameron probably hoped.

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