Cert 15 100mins Stars 2

Opera is the music of love in this hostage drama which is a flat, tuneless and poorly paced exercise of uncertain rhythm which staggers to a muted crescendo.

Julianne Moore is luminous in a formal evening gown as Roxane Coss, an agreeably spiky and unsympathetic US opera singer, but for such an accomplished actress Moore’s a terrible mime, and we should gifted soprano Renee Fleming is doing the actual singing.

While on a tour of Latin America her private recital at an embassy is interrupted by revolutionary guerillas who take the international dignitaries hostage.

The surprisingly relaxed regime of the khaki-clad desperadoes leads to some midnight bed hopping and at it’s most unintentionally farcical this could have been named Carry On Up the Junta.

The script assumes opera is a great unifier so you may feel excluded if your musical tastes lie elsewhere, and bullet fire is a welcome relief to the preceding dirge.