Peter Hyams may have directed the great “Outland” but he also directed the laughable “Timecop” so I went into “A Sound Of Thunder” unsure of what to expect. This is a movie that looks so much like one made for television that you can hardly believe this got into theatres.

In “A Sound Of Thunder”, the year in 2055 and time travel has been invented and commercialised. Rich people pay to be transported back to the prehistoric era to gun down dinosaurs but on one of these expeditions, something goes horribly wrong and it causes a chain of events that alter evolution. Now a new reality is merging with our own as new horrifying creatures emerge and only some scientists can put things right.

The character in this movie are quite frankly awful. I did not care about any of the scientists at all. Ben Kingsley (“Gandhi”) plays a shameless businessman that is in charge of the company that offers the time travel expeditions. He is pretty good as the sort-of salesman that could sell sand to the Arabs. The monsters in this movie are hilariously bad and that is largely due to the low-budget special effects. The C.G.I. in this film is some of the worst I have ever seen so it is not surprising that you cannot take the monsters seriously.

The special effects are terrible, the characters are boring and the monsters are not remotely convincing. While some of the concepts are interesting, you realise how dumb this film really is when you actually think about the moment the characters choose to be sent back to in order to prevent the disaster. I will not spoil it but for anybody that has seen the movie, they must surely acknowledge that these scientists are not really very intelligent. “A Sound Of Thunder” might be good for a few laughs but that is about it.