“Mortal Engines” (** out of four) was a joyless adaptation of Phillip Reeve’s blockbuster novel set in a post-apocalyptic world about a young man (Robert Sheehan) and a masked assailant (Hera Hilmar) who are both thrown out of their predatorial moving city by the powerful and evil Head Of The Guild Of Historians (Hugo Weaving) and have to fend for themselves and try to enact revenge. Opens and closes with spectacular action scenes and is filled with sumptuous visual effects through-out but story sputters to a halt in the middle and becomes jumbled and dull. One of the producers was Peter Jackson and you can see his blueprint, especially in film’s large-scale action scenes. Weaving is good but he was more entertaining more-or-less playing the same role in “The Matrix” almost two decades ago.