I'm a bit slow with this review as Absolutely Anything opened last week. But August is the silly season and this is a film that truly fits the bill as it is spectacularly silly, a tad saucy and yet suitable for the whole family to giggle at together.

As the work of the Monty Python team - notably Terry Jones who co-writes and directs - you would expect this to be silly and there is no greater joy than introducing your offspring to the dead parrot and ministry of silly walks. Neither are in this, but we do get all the living Pythons, though only vocally as they have been turned, courtesy of CGI, into a group of rather unattractive bickering aliens who have come up with an intergalactic challenge for a randomly selected person on earth - namely Neil Clarke (Simon Pegg).

The aliens have given Neil the power to do anything and if he uses it for good, earth will stay intact. If he is selfish, it's curtains for mankind. Neil is, of course, unaware of what's at stake, so you can't really blame him for doing silly things at first, the best of which is enabling his gorgeous dog, Dennis, to talk. That the dog is voiced by the late comic genius, Robin Williams, makes the act an unselfish one and much fun is had with the mutt, whose first word is "biscuits".

You can't really blame Neil for wanting to try his luck as the American president or to eat dinner without lifting cutlery. It's all stuff that, given half a chance, we would all enjoy and kids will get a real kick out of it. The film has a few issues, the most obvious ones for me being the casting of glossy Kate Beckinsale as Neil's unlikely girl next-door suitor and a tendency for the dialogue to be too sitcom. But it does the job for summer.