DVDs of the week

SPEED KILLS (CERT 15) £9.99

Domineering and gleefully self-absorbed actress Irina Arkadina (Annette Bening) pays a visit to the country estate of her sickly brother Sorin (Brian Dennehy), who is braced for the carnage that inevitably follows his sibling. Irina brings her lover, esteemed writer Boris Trigorin (Corey Stoll), which creates friction with her artistically minded playwright son Konstantin (Billy Howle). He harbours desires for the innocent girl next door, Nina Zarechnaya (Saoirse Ronan), but she has eyes only for Boris. Adding to the tangled web of unrequited adoration, local lush Masha (Elisabeth Moss) is secretly in love with Konstantin and waits patiently for him to return her yearning glances. Meanwhile she rejects overtures from admirer Medvedenko (Michael Zegen) and, as true feelings bubble to the surface, young hearts are shattered by the cruel intentions of an older generation. The Seagull is a handsome period drama adapted from Chekhov’s comedy in four acts, which deals with universal themes of unrequited love, jealousy and self-sacrifice. Michael Mayer’s film tinkers with the structure of the source text for no obvious reason, or dramatic payoff, and screenwriter Stephen Karam ramps up the comedy, allowing Bening to earn easy laughs every time her ageing starlet devours tiny crumbs of self-congratulations.

In 1962, construction business owner Ben Aronoff (John Travolta) leaves behind New Jersey to start afresh in Miami. He jettisons his first wife (Jennifer Esposito) and son (Charlie Gillespie) to reel in a trophy partner (Katheryn Winnick) and oversee a speedboat empire catering to the rich and criminally powerful. When Ben starts to drown in debt and seeks a cash injection from mafia financier Meyer Lansky (James Remar) and his nephew Robby (Kellan Lutz), it’s not long before his high-spec boats are being used to courier drugs under the noses of the coastguard and DEA. Opening with the death of its lead character, Speed Kills is a horribly ill-judged biographical drama loosely inspired by the life of Don Aronow. Screenwriters David Aaron Cohen and John Luessenhop heavily fictionalise their two-dimensional anti-hero, presumably to dodge potential lawsuits from figures who appear under their real names, including George HW Bush (Matthew Modine). The script employs a breathless voiceover to plug holes in the narrative but Jodi Scurfield’s film takes on too much water in the opening 10 minutes to stay afloat. Sporting an unflattering brown thatch that, when wet, looks like roadkill, Travolta fails to convey the magnetism of his high-flying entrepreneur. Powerboat scenes are hastily assembled from stock footage aside from one poorly staged race in a computer-generated storm that is hilarious for the wrong reasons.