"Good things come to those who wait," goes the old cliché. That's not always the case. Just ask Robert Towne. The screenwriter of the legendary 'Chinatown' (and the first two 'Mission: Impossible' flicks) has wanted to adapt John Fante's 1930s novel 'Ask The Dust' since the 1970s. Twenty years later, he'd written a screenplay but no studio was interested in producing it. He should have taken the hint.

Eventually Johnny Depp and Val Kilmer came and went, Salma Hayek rejected the lead female role. But Tom Cruise stuck around as producer, finally attracting Colin Farrell and luring Hayek back. She shouldn’t have changed her mind.

Appearing almost 30 years after Towne first met Fante, his amateurish film is a contrived Mills and Boone love story with sloppy direction, melodramatic acting, rickety sets, and a screenplay the producers of e.tv soap 'Scandal' would throw out as substandard.

Armed with the most stilted dialogue this side of a cheapie soft porn movie, Farrell and Hayek play a bad writer (did he pen this film?) and a pretty, but frankly lousy, waitress in 1930s California (aka the Muizenberg area of Cape Town). He's an Italian who wants to write the great American novel. She's a Mexican immigrant looking for a wealthy Gringo to marry.

At first they fight. About her shoes. About the coffee. Of course this really means they're madly in love with each other. They just don’t know it yet — (add stupidity to their list of character flaws).

Feeble attempts to spice up the tale — random obsessive woman, an earthquake (or shaking the camera around a bit), Salma regularly taking off her clothes, and Donald Sutherland as a sweaty alcoholic who likes getting it on with the milkman — remain just that: feeble.

Somewhat ironically, then, Towne's film proves that good things can come to those who wait — for the viewer of 'Ask The Dust' it's when the final credits roll.