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THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR opens to withering reviews and dismal box-office. Directed by Michael Chapman, working from John Sayles’ severely abridged adaptation of Jean M. Auel’s best-selling novel, the story, set in prehistoric Europe, charts the life of a young Cro-Magnon girl (played by the anachronistically willowy Daryl Hannah) who is adopted by a group of cave-dwelling, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals after her parents perish in an earthquake. Bereft of the anthropological insight that informed every frame of Jean Jacques Annaud’s far superior prehistoric epic, Quest For Fire, the film plods with the measured pace of a Disney wildlife adventure contemporised for the benefit of an undemanding multiplex audience
