WES Anderson specialises in misfits. Even his films don't fit in, swimming against the Hollywood tide with their refusal to conform.

After the self-possessed, outsider student in Rushmore and the dysfunctional high-society family in The Royal Tenenbaums, he takes to the water for an homage to Jacques Cousteau, wrapped up in a pastiche of eccentric French film-making from Jacques Tati to Amelie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Back on board with Anderson is the master of bemusement, Bill Murray, the industrialist Herman Blume in Rushmore, now out of step with the world in The Life Aquatic.

First encountered wearing a red woolly hat and diamond ear studs with his dinner jacket, Murray's grizzled, snowy-bearded Steve Zissou is immediately marked out as not being your standard loaf of bread. Once a hotshot TV film-maker, this dope-smoking underwater adventurer is a self-pitying letch and vengeful loose cannon, obsessively on the trail of a mythical shark that has eaten his partner, Esteban.

Still a magnetic figure, Zissou has somehow pulled together a ragbag crew, among them kooky Willem Defoe's scarily loyal right-hand man; Owen Wilson's calculating young pilot, who claims to be Zissou's estranged son; and Cate Blanchett's pregnant, terribly old-school English journalist. Before the mission is through, smart estranged wife Anjelica Huston and oily old rival Jeff Goldblum will be sticking their oar in too.

There is an anarchic, stoner spirit to Anderson's film-making, as if he is forever determined to trip up any scene that threatens to stray into normality. Such is his detachment and wilful changing of mood that he undermines the potential for humour, and all the relationships are so full of quirks and blind bends, it is difficult to form any attachment to any character. Even the constantly shifting sands of Murray and Wilson start to sag.

In the absence of dramatic momentum and big laughs, the pleasure lies in Anderson's sense of wonder and ever quirky imagination. His surrealist seabed is full of animated fish (courtesy of The Nightmare Before Christmas's Henry Selick); Zissou's open-plan ship is the stuff of pleasure fantasy and dodgy wiring; and the delightfully off-the-wall soundtrack reinvents David Bowie songs as Portuguese busking numbers.

As adult resignation battles with youthful inner spirit, The Life Aquatic drifts off into the sunset, making you smile at its bursts of oddball magic, but you rarely laugh before returning to our grey world.

Updated: 15:49 Thursday, February 24, 2005