Film: Will John Cusack let the cat out of 'The Bag Man'?

Based on a screenplay by American actor James Russo, and adapted by Paul Conway and David Grovic, who makes his directorial debut here, (Fox Movies Premium, Saturday at 9pm) is a mob thriller packed with top-grade talent.

John Cusack (The Raven) plays Jack, a professional hitman hired by a big-time gangster (surprise, surprise, it's Bobby De Niro) to pick up a mysterious bag and take it to a seedy motel in the middle of nowhere.

Ensconced in room 13, he must sit tight and wait for the bag to be collected. The only rule: don't look inside. Now, when you're couriering a bag for a handsome amount of cash and are forbidden from taking a sneaky peek, it's pretty obvious you're not on the weekly nappy run. The bag is going to contain something special and that something is going to lead to a great deal of trouble. Which it inevitably does, and in the most violent of ways.

The bulk of the movie sees Jack trying to protect the bag from an absurd collection of creeps - a Serbian dwarf, a one-eyed pimp, a crooked sheriff (Dominic Purcell; Prison Break) and a shady wheelchair-bound hotel clerk (Crispin Glover, of Back to the Future fame, mixing things up with about four accents). Next into the fray struts a lanky blue-haired prostitute (Rebecca Da Costa, below), who toys both physically and mentally with Jack.

Shot in near darkness, with grand aspirations of being a pulpy David Lynch-esque noir, the plot builds the tension around the bag's contents while we wait for the obligatory twist. Sadly, with its tedious pacing and exhausting parade of shady characters, The Bag Man left me simply not caring what the contents might be.

Finally, the bag's secrets are revealed, but don't hold your breath, we've seen it all before. (Perhaps it should have contained a better script.)