Read our review of Baz Luhrmann's Australia

Oh dear, oh dear. The Australians are investing a huge amount of expectation, and many millions of promotional dollars, in an epic movie intended to reinvigorate tourism and a sense of national pride.

You know the kind of thing. Great raw, soaring landscapes, wild brumbies, rough blokes, mystical Aborigines, a gorgeous sheila, fair bit of Foster's. Sort of Crocodile Dundee with gravitas, or Picnic at Hanging Rock with sex - and therefore, in most people's eyes, a potential hit.

Australia the movie, however, has one huge problem. It stars Nicole Kidman. Big mistake. Big, big mistake. At a stroke, the world's female cinemagoers will say as one: “I'm not going to see it if she's in it.”

Kidman is one of those women who turns other women off. And no, not just because she's pretty and we're jealous. It is because we perceive, and men don't, that she's one of the most overrated actors in the world, a woman who has been the kiss of death in practically every movie she has starred in.

Kidman is exquisitely accomplished at being awful. Did anyone see Cold Mountain? The sweeping American epic (note: another epic) foundered on the rocks of her gormless mirror-gaze. She can't act. Instead, she drifts around films like a lost porcelain doll, looking frozen, brittle and vapid, staring at the camera with her oh-golly-look-how-I'm-looking-interesting blue eyes.

And today's (predominantly male) directors haven't quite woken up to the fact that it just isn't enough for female actors just to wander around like supermodels: they need another skill too. Like emotion.

Kidman was said to be superb in To Die For. She was merely cold and brittle in a part that demanded it. That doesn't make her a comic genius. She managed to make Eyes Wide Shut - that “odyssey of sexual and moral discovery” with Tom Cruise - without creating a single intellectual or sexual spark.

Swiftly, she specialised in not-very-good thrillers about obsessives and haunted women. She gave good red carpet. Kidman became a cipher for men's desires; she simpered, gasped and screamed just as any helpless Hitchcockian blonde victim should.

But Kidman is guilty of something else. Not only did she get away with it, but she has spawned a genre of similarly flawless female actors who pout and scream very beautifully, but cannot act to save their lives: Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightley - with faces like atrophied dolls, capable of adjusting their emotions only on direction; the biggest screen turn-offs in decades.

Australia the country deserves redder blood than this.

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