To think I could have just rented Steamboy and got it over and done with. But it was only the UK Theatrical cut that was available to rent and with a Director's Cut available in a limited edition box set out there I had to be a snob and go buy that. What a complete waste of money. Steamboy is a steaming pile of crap! The only thing I liked about it was the quaint depiction of olden-days English countryside. The rest was so phenomenally boring, that I was almost falling asleep.<br /><br />James Ray Steam (voiced by Anna Paquin, sounding more like a Gaelic South-African than a boy from Manchester) is the grandson of some good scientist and the son of some bad scientist...blah blah blah...steam power...blah blah blah...war machines. Christ almighty, I am sending myself into terminal coma even summarising this guff! <br /><br />The cover makes it look like some sort of exciting superhero story. But all of the action happens in the last 10 minutes. Everything before this is so, so unbelievably slow. Every line of dialogue so flat. Every character bland as living hell.<br /><br />I wish to erase this film from my memory forever and I am extremely bitter over the 2 hours I WASTED watching it.