Given the talent involved, however, one might reasonably have hoped for more. Orlando Jones, the semi-suave 7-Up spokesguy who had the misfortune of costarring in “The Replacements,” gets his first leading-man role here as Daryl Chase, a New York investment banker who sheds his identity and heads for the Mexican border after being framed for killing two cops. Along the way, he switches identities with Freddy Tiffany (Eddie Griffin), a seemingly hapless pimp-daddy thug who turns up everywhere Daryl goes.

If Jones is the smooth, handsome type with a clueless streak, Griffin (star of the UPN sitcom “Malcolm & Eddie”) is an irritating little waterbug who won’t shut up or get out of your face. The pairing has its moments — I imagine the producers were thinking of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis — but you get the feeling Griffin and Jones would have been happier just hanging out and shooting the shit, without these cardboard characters along. When the nonsensical plot full of switchbacks, shootouts and high-speed escapes skids to a halt so Daryl and Freddy can stage an impromptu dance contest at a deserted Texas gas station, or watch a country-western performance at an emu ranch, “Double Take” seems most in touch with its essential spirit of good-natured pointlessness.

But once he’s got Daryl playing homeboy in Adidas sweats and Kangol lid, and Freddy playing Harvard buppie in an Italian suit, writer-director George Gallo tries to dazzle us with various plot switcheroos. Is McCready (Gary Grubbs), the growly CIA agent who has vowed to protect Daryl, really the pawn of a Mexican drug lord? Are the two FBI agents (Daniel Roebuck and Sterling Macer) chasing Daryl really hit men? Maybe posing as phat Freddy wasn’t such a hot idea, since the dude with the Albert Einstein-meets-Al Sharpton ‘do is wanted in Mexico for murdering a state governor. But was Freddy also framed, and is he actually a superpowered double-undercover government agent on a psychiatric discharge? Finally, is there a cash prize for figuring all this out? Because if there isn’t, nobody’s going to bother.

Gallo has a minor cult reputation in Hollywood, mostly because of his screenplay for the 1988 action comedy “Midnight Run,” which paired Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin as bounty hunter and fugitive. But his script for “Double Take” is no better than a lackadaisical retread of the “Midnight Run” formula (even if it’s actually a comic remake of a 1957 Rod Steiger drama called “Across the Bridge”). And his direction is so undisciplined it makes a film that runs fewer than 90 minutes feel like it’s abysmally long and full of dead patches. There are extended and witless cute-animal gags involving a Chihuahua Freddy is carrying around in a leather backpack. Several decent actors disappear into the mediocrity, almost without a trace: Shawn Elliott plays a Mexican trafficker with a gross false eyeball; avuncular Edward Herrmann plays Daryl’s patrician boss.

Even the interplay between Jones and Griffin, which ought to be the film’s centerpiece, is disappointingly mild. Actually, Daryl and Freddy make a funnier odd couple before they switch identities; the irrepressible Griffin is at his best getting jiggy with the Hare Krishna dancers on a Manhattan street corner, while Jones plays a blithe, unflappable straight man in the Buster Keaton mold. Gallo struggles to make a point about how differently Daryl is treated after he takes the suit off, but that never becomes a major issue as he flees the “shoot-a-brother-41-times NYPD,” in Freddy’s phrase. Instead, we get shtick about Daryl’s dated notions of how to act “black” (Freddy: “What was the last movie you saw? ‘Car Wash’?”) and an extended argument with an Amtrak waiter, in Daryl’s put-on ghetto accent, about Schlitz malt liquor.

You get the feeling that everyone was in a good mood and the margaritas were pouring, but neither Gallo nor anybody else ever found a bottom line for this movie or its characters. At first Daryl doesn’t know how to act black, then he does. When Freddy says something like, “I’ve done mischief in Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil — all the Mexican countries,” is he an idiot impersonating a federal agent, a federal agent impersonating an idiot or an idiot federal agent? It’s not that I care about these things, exactly, but somebody should. In one of the movie’s better moments, the redneck emu rancher (Brent Briscoe) explains to Daryl that his charges possess “virtually no fat and all the flavor and nutrients of chicken and steak combined, in one easily farmable bird.” If only “Double Take,” with its promising ingredients, added up to something as nourishing as that emu.

Any film with either John Malkovich or Willem Dafoe in it already has art at least halfway up the butt. When you get both of them plus film history plus vampires, the syndrome reaches near-toxic proportions. In “Shadow of the Vampire,” Malkovich stars as legendary silent-film director F.W. Murnau; Dafoe, in ghoulish makeup, plays a genuine vampire hired to impersonate one in Murnau’s 1922 classic “Nosferatu.” The combination certainly sounds like the ultimate in ’90s hipsterism, but all that this glum and slight entertainment manages to prove is that the ’90s are over.

Naturally, if you fall into the demographic subgroup described above, the magnetism of the cast and premise will probably prove irresistible, no matter what I say. If not, don’t say you weren’t warned.

An art-up-the-butt avatar such as R.W. Fassbinder or Wim Wenders would have reveled in the archness and overripeness of this whole enterprise: Who is the real vampire — the honest bloodsucker or the ruthless artist? As it is, Steven Katz’s screenplay feels choppy and uncertain, but in hands like those its morphine-fueled pace and grandiose pronouncements about aesthetics might have been rendered into a languorous, decadent delight, chocolate with an absinthe center. E. Elias Merhige, an American director known for the underground film “Begotten” and his music videos for Marilyn Manson, can only manage a mildly amusing spoof with some striking images, a “Saturday Night Live” sketch for film students.

When “Shadow of the Vampire” is enjoyable, it’s largely thanks to Malkovich, who plays Murnau as the brainier older brother of Joel Grey’s sinister master of ceremonies in “Cabaret.” Drifting through the set of his masterpiece like a distracted mad scientist, goggles askew on his forehead, he intones, “Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the motion picture. Our poetry, our music, will have a context as certain as the grave.”

Later, when his relationship with his living-dead “star” has gone sour, Murnau castigates the ancient bloodsucker in tones of consummate boredom. “Die alone, you vampire rat bastard,” he says with no apparent emotion. “Moonchaser, blasphemer, monkey.”

Dafoe does indeed look like a cross between a rat and a monkey as Max Schreck, whom Murnau hires to play the vampire Count Orlock. The historical Schreck was an obscure actor who left little trace of himself on the world beyond his memorable performance in “Nosferatu.” In Katz and Merhige’s version of events, there was no Schreck; the name was a convenient fiction to conceal the sinister deal Murnau made with the real Orlock, a filthy and desiccated vampire he discovered hiding in rural Czechoslovakia. In the interests of both science and art, Murnau would preserve Orlock on celluloid for posterity, and in return deliver him the tender neck of Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack), the film’s depraved and delectable leading lady.

Hissing, shuffling his feet, eyeing the cast and crew with evident hunger, Dafoe’s Schreck is a distinctively loathsome creation, with none of the erotic suavity of your typical Dracula. When Murnau becomes angry with him for attacking the cinematographer rather than, say, the script girl, Schreck sniffs the air with interest. “The script girl?” he says. “I’ll eat her later.”

In the film’s single best scene, Schreck joins producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and screenwriter Henrick Galeen (John Aden Gillet) as they drink schnapps during a break in production. Amused by Schreck’s method-actor refusal to break character, they ask him questions about life as a vampire. The novel “Dracula” made him sad, Schreck says. Vampires live alone so long that they become aristocrats without servants, he explains, detached from the details of human life. “Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select wine and cheese?” For the first and nearly the only time, “Shadow of the Vampire” seems to be about its characters rather than its clever ideas.

As Merhige skips from the Jofa studios in Berlin to the Czech village where Murnau has Schreck concealed to the island of Heligoland, where the plots of both films reach their dénouements, he never establishes a guiding tone, or defines his characters clearly. Is Murnau ridiculous, evil or noble? Is Schreck/Orlock a monster, an object of pity or just a gag man? To what extent is “Shadow of the Vampire” intended as self-parody or farce? I found myself unable to answer these questions, but I do know that the “German” accents used by the entire cast are a heinous mistake. Kier at least has the excuse of being German, but there’s no excuse for everybody else in the movie talking like Colonel Klink. (Schreck: “How you vould harm me ven even I don’t know how I vould harm myzelf.”)

Unable to control Schreck’s predatory urges or to retreat from their bargain, Murnau presses forward toward his film’s completion and a final confrontation with Schreck, sacrificing everything for art as the actors and technicians drop around him like flies. (Murnau, at the moment when Schreck finally gets his fangs into Greta: “Frankly, Count, I find this composition unworkable.”)

Malkovich and Dafoe increasingly dominate the film, but their hambone acting, although entertaining in itself, comes to seem increasingly pointless. This is especially strange given Merhige’s glimpses of how silents were actually shot, with the director essentially narrating the action while the actors improvise under his command. “Shadow of the Vampire” must be the most undisciplined film ever made about a tyrannical filmmaker.

Even if Murnau really was a self-important fop full of queeny pretentions (and even if he really hired a vampire), “Nosferatu” was one of the earliest and greatest accomplishments of supernatural cinema, and Merhige’s film can’t stand up to it. After the lovely opening credit sequence in imitation expressionist style, an overly chatty intertitle informs us that the “brilliant” Murnau became “one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.” This calls to mind my seventh-grade creative writing teacher’s advice: Show, don’t tell. What Merhige actually shows us is a bloodless film about bloodlust, a horror comedy that’s occasionally funny but is never frightening, an academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

I enjoyed various moments in a few of those movies, especially the ones that were too weird or mean-spirited to draw much of an audience, but I enjoyed them for the same reason that hostages eventually come to identify with the terrorists who feed them weak tea and grilled rat. My only choices were to adapt or perish. In the interest of national unity and healing our partisan divide, I will make no further comments about “Mission to Mars” or “The Replacements,” except to concede that only one of them can be the worst movie ever made.

With Hollywood in full retreat into its most conventional mode, old-fashioned art-house filmmaking seemed to blossom in any number of unexpected places. As a child of the ’70s who was weaned on high-flown European art cinema and grind-house horror movies, I have no complaints. My top three picks here are all conventional film-critic choices, and despite seeming impossibly disparate all have traditional roots. They’d stand out among the best movies of any year imaginable, and the distinctions I draw between them are simply individual prejudice. (Movies I missed that might have made the list: “Beau Travail,” “Before Night Falls,” “Hamlet,” “Traffic.”)

1) “Yi Yi” This is arguably the most ordinary of my top three films, but the characters in the extended middle-class family chronicled here by Taiwanese writer-director Edward Yang have worked their way into my life as if they were my own relatives. Ever since seeing Yang’s “The Terrorizer” more than a decade ago at the San Francisco Film Festival, I’ve expected this Taiwanese writer-director to have an international breakout. If his earlier work seemed under the influence of Luis Buñuel and Bernardo Bertolucci, “Yi Yi” is in a less showy but perhaps more profound mode. In fact, you could call this an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” transposed to contemporary Taipei. A profoundly humane and marvelously pitched drama, it finds romance, pathos, farce, violence and the presence of the sacred within the text of ordinary bourgeois existence.

2) “Dancer in the Dark” Love it or hate it — and I can sympathize, up to a point, with those who feel the latter emotion — this agonizing, amazing film establishes Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier as one of the signature artists of our age. Is “Dancer in the Dark” a tragedy or a tragic joke? I can’t tell, and I don’t know whether von Trier can either. But it’s dangerous to assume that such questions have a single, simple answer; to me, “Dancer” has the uncategorizable brilliance of real cinematic magic. There’s certainly no cynicism to Icelandic pop singer Björk’s heart-wrenching performance as Selma, the blind factory worker willing to sacrifice herself before an incredibly cruel fate to save her little boy, nor to the astonishing musical numbers, written and performed by Björk and shot by von Trier in oversaturated digital video with multiple motionless cameras. On first viewing I felt “Dancer” had a black heart. But another viewer (my mother, actually) convinced me that its vision of 1964 America is really the land of fable, a mythical landscape where Hans Christian Andersen, Thomas Hardy and Franz Kafka would seek moments of redemption amid the shadows.

3) “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” No movie has blended the erotic, spiritual and even feminist elements of the martial-arts genre quite as subtly and graciously as this surpassingly lovely film from trans-Pacific journeyman Ang Lee. That’s not the same thing as saying those elements weren’t present in abundance, as anyone who has seen Tsui Hark’s “Chinese Ghost Story” films can attest. But Lee is not to blame for the fact that American audiences are largely unfamiliar with the tradition from which “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” springs. And even hardcore Hong Kong action geeks will find much to admire in the highflying fight scenes choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping (of “The Matrix” and countless Hong Kong classics). What Lee’s huge budget and decelerated pace provide is the opportunity to shoot on glorious Chinese locations as well as in the studio. As in his other movies, which have ranged from Taiwanese gay society to ’70s Long Island to the U.S. Civil War, a superb pictorial sense and a contemplative atmosphere ultimately take precedence over plot and action. Stars Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi are undeniably athletic and compelling, but Lee’s film is strongest when he captures them up close, as human beings struggling with the demands of love and duty.

4) “A Time for Drunken Horses” Technically this raw and wrenching work of naturalism was made in Iran, and in fact writer-director Bahman Ghobadi appears as an actor in Abbas Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us” (see No. 6 below). But “A Time for Drunken Horses” is virtually cinéma vérité, with little of the intellectual meditation that characterizes Kiarostami’s films. (Even the title, as viewers of the film will learn, is literal rather than poetic.) Shot in the rugged mountains along the Iran-Iraq border and “starring” a group of local children who essentially play themselves, this is apparently the first Kurdish film to find international distribution. Although it’s devastatingly effective as a drama in the Italian neorealist vein — imagine “The Bicycle Thief” transported to the Near East — “Drunken Horses” serves a didactic function as well, depicting the isolated and impoverished Kurds as a proud people gradually being crushed by fate and geopolitics. Ghobadi has a tremendous eye for telling sensory detail, and 12-year-old Ayoub Ahmadi, as the boy trying to care for his two sisters and crippled brother, makes in his own way as flawed and noble a hero as Odysseus.

5) “Mifune” If you didn’t know that this razor-edged romantic comedy from Danish director Soren Kragh-Jacobsen was made according to the Dogma ’95 manifesto (which bans guns, musical soundtracks and all manner of special effects), well, you just wouldn’t know, that’s all. Although the Dogma decrees have made some critics fulminate, they seem to me essentially a prescription for producing intimate drama in the mode of early Ingmar Bergman and Eric Rohmer. If you’re looking for models, you could certainly do worse. There’s nothing arty or pretentious about this edgy, likable tale of a Copenhagen yuppie (Anders Berthelsen) who suffers a meltdown right after his marriage to the boss’s daughter and escapes to the ramshackle family farm where his father has just died. There he shacks up with his simple-minded brother (Jesper Asholt), a beautiful hooker on the lam (Iben Hjejle, much more at home here than in “High Fidelity”) and eventually her misfit younger brother (Emil Tarding) as well. Touching and in the end perhaps a teensy bit sentimental, “Mifune” nonetheless never looks away from the enormous pain these evasive characters put themselves through, and its dark comic streak is immensely rewarding.

6) “The Wind Will Carry Us” Perhaps even more frustrating and elliptical than “A Taste of Cherry,” the film that finally brought Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami a wide international reputation, “The Wind Will Carry Us” is nonetheless rich with myth and mystery, with glorious landscapes and the apparent ability to suspend time. Kiarostami is decidedly not for everyone; while his films do indeed have stories and characters, they reveal themselves only gradually and never completely. Here a man believed to be an engineer arrives in a beautiful remote village and cultivates the locals as he waits for something to happen. In a comic reiteration, we watch him repeatedly pile into his SUV and drive frantically to high ground, cellphone pressed to his ear, in a frantic effort to receive a call from Tehran. (Not that useful information is ever conveyed, it would seem.) Finally a strange, semierotic encounter in an underground cave, and a lifesaving mission, unlock some of the film’s secrets. For the tiny minority who care, the fact that most of this astringent, lyrical master’s 28 films have been virtually unseen in the West is a powerful reason to remain on the planet.

7) “Chunhyang” Ho-hum; just another epic costume drama with postmodern flourishes adapted from the ancient traditions of pansori, or Korean folk opera. I have no idea if any Western viewers are still brave enough for this kind of thing, but “Chunhyang” is the biggest production in the history of Korean cinema and it’s a spectacle of amazing richness and variety. A classic tale of love lost and redeemed, it focuses on the passionate, forbidden affair between an 18th century noble and a courtesan’s daughter. But that’s leaving out the 8,000 extras, 12,000 costumes and many wondrous sets, as well as the narrator who chants or sings along with the action (sometimes anticipating it) and the moments when the whole thing seems to be a stage play performed for a modern audience. Director Im Kwon Taek may be virtually unknown outside his homeland, but he has made almost 100 films (!) in what some observers have called the world’s most avidly movie-loving nation. With “Chunhyang,” a window I never noticed before opens; the view is breathtaking.

“You Can Count on Me” Mark Ruffalo’s performance as the deadbeat brother who disrupts Laura Linney’s petit-bourgeois single-mom existence in a picturesque upstate New York town lifts the directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan well above the level of indie family drama. Although Ruffalo seems like a shiftless would-be Kerouac, he makes a surprisingly able surrogate dad to young Rory Culkin, while it’s Linney who dives into a disastrous affair with her uptight boss (a memorable supporting role for Matthew Broderick). A whimsical, affectionate and uncondescending portrait of middle-middle American life, “You Can Count on Me” is a bit slight and suffers from some late dramatic missteps. But Lonergan’s narrative generosity and eye for detail mostly make up for that.

9) “Time Code” OK, it’s basically a gag, a Hollywood soap opera refracted into four camera angles and shot in real time on digital video, with no effects or editing. Call it live theater mixed with surveillance video, and if it ain’t great theater it’s pretty damn good surveillance video. Of course director Mike Figgis still guides the narrative, turning the audio up or down to focus the viewer’s attention on one or another of the four visible images. But the tale of studio adultery and intrigue in “Time Code” is at least as amusing as Robert Altman’s “The Player” (and less portentous) and the gag works especially well on video, where you can keep rewinding to see what happened in the three images you weren’t watching. I’m not sure this experiment will be long remembered or widely emulated, but it’s worth checking out.

10) “Bamboozled” Yeah, it’s a mess, a withering flame-thrower blast of Swiftian satire directed at anyone and everyone in the entertainment industry, from audiences to executives. But unlike most of my friends I was pretty much convinced by Spike Lee’s argument that no one in our culture, black, white or otherwise, is even halfway free of deeply ingrained racist beliefs and stereotypes. Damon Wayans’ performance as a buppie TV executive with a fake-o French accent seems way out beyond the outfield fence. Then you realize that Pierre is supposed to be ludicrous, no more a fleshed-out character than Christian Bale’s serial killer in “American Psycho.” Much of “Bamboozled” is grimly hilarious, like its buffoonish hip-hop band (the Mau Maus) or Michael Rapaport’s über-down white boy, and some of it is hallucinatory to the point of incoherence and insanity. Lee would argue that it’s an insanity we all share.

“The Family Man” is not merely another movie knockoff of Charles Dickens’ often-filmed “A Christmas Carol” — the ur-text for all such didactic fables — although that’s a big part of the story. It’s also a new entry in the ’90s litany of films about soulless yuppies transformed into caring and sensitive guys, usually through the magical powers of children. (See also Bruce Willis in “The Kid,” Jim Carrey in “Liar Liar,” Harrison Ford in “Regarding Henry.”) Here, Nicolas Cage provides a positively delightful razor’s-edge performance as Jack Campbell, a filthy rich, swinging-single investment banker who wakes up one morning as a New Jersey tire salesman with a wife and two kids. Jack is such an unredeemed rascal, and his reactions to his new life in suburbia so histrionic, that we hardly notice the movie painting itself into a narrative corner where it finally dies of neglect.

Maybe the problem is that Jack’s just too damn much fun. As usual, Cage seems to be risking a coronary at every moment with his overheated acting style, and he certainly plays Jack as a self-important workaholic who believes the world (especially its population of lingerie models) is at his command. But he seems way more likable than the guys I see on the streets of Manhattan every day. He bounds through his underfurnished luxury apartment singing opera to himself (badly). He flirts agreeably with his downstairs neighbor, offers free financial advice to his doorman and cuts up with his gruff but twinkly boss (Josef Sommer), who describes himself as “a heartless bastard who only cares about money.” Awww. Who knows whether the zillion-dollar deals these guys make are truly evil? (The movie certainly doesn’t.) They may be maniacs, but they’re not cruel or vicious people; working for them looks like a blast.

After Jack clumsily tries to intervene in a Christmas Eve racial incident at his neighborhood convenience store, a homeboy angel named Cash (Don Cheadle) decides to show him what his maxed-out life is lacking. (If I had a dollar for every movie in which a black person serves as a white person’s font of magic and wisdom, I could start my own damn studio.) So when Jack wakes up on Christmas morning, there’s a big, sloppy St. Bernard-retriever mix licking his face. In this reality, he married his college sweetheart Kate (Téa Leoni), bred a couple of rugrats, slid off the fast track and wound up managing his father-in-law’s tire dealership.

Director Brett Ratner (“Rush Hour”) and Cage milk plenty of laughs out of Jack’s abject amazement and horror at his middle-middle predicament. Leoni (best known to celebrity aficionados as David Duchovny’s wife) was always a wry, sparkling presence on her mid-’90s TV series “The Naked Truth,” and it’s great to see her in a major film, but Kate is nothing more than a rather dim straight woman to Jack’s antics. She only minds a little when her husband, rather than opening presents with the kids, rushes out of the house screaming, “Where’s my Ferrari?!” and disappears for hours. Nor does she seem to find it seriously troubling that he forgets their anniversary, forgets what she likes to do in bed, doesn’t know what either of them does for a living and has overnight lost his bowling ability.

Cage can do more by simply exhaling than any actor in movie history; with one nearly silent expulsion of breath, he can express all the existential disappointment of European philosophy. When he opens suburban Jack’s closet for the first time to view the baby-blue sweater vests and Hawaiian shirts, he heaves a heavy sigh: “This is just subpar.” On his first attempt to change his infant son’s soiled diaper, his eyes roll back in his head as if he’s about to lose consciousness: “Oh! Holy Mother of God!”

As long as Jack is a drowning man desperately trying to stay afloat in an unfamiliar sea, “The Family Man” remains crisp and amiable. He even forms an unlikely alliance with his 6-year-old daughter, who understands immediately that Daddy has been replaced by an alien to whom the world’s every detail must be explained. When Jack arrives at the day-care center and sits, paralyzed by panic, in the family minivan, she prompts him: “This is where babies go while their parents are at work.”

On a trip to the mall, Jack is momentarily seduced by an Ermenegildo Zegna suit, the kind of thing he ordered by the dozen in version 1.0 of his life. When Kate reminds him gently that a tire salesman with a family can’t afford to spend $2,400 on something he might wear once a year, he rips off the offending garment and launches into a vintage Cage slow burn: “Forget it! We’ll get a funnel cake. It’ll be a highlight of my week.”

Of course, you know where this is headed. Our hero will gradually come to appreciate the simple pleasures of his new life in split-level-land and won’t want to be old master-of-the-universe Jack Campbell anymore. Ratner handles this downhill slide into conventional sentiment about as well as anyone could, although as an audience member I fought against it tooth and claw. The home video Jack discovers, in which he sings “La La La Means I Love You” to Kate at her birthday barbecue, is a highly effective piece of emotional manipulation, both ludicrous and touching. But in the end conventional sentiment, rather than any actual morality, is all that the script for “The Family Man” (by David Diamond and David Weissman) has to offer.

If “The Family Man” argued that the amped-up Jack was stealing from widows and orphans and bankrupting entire African nations (as he probably is), it might have a legitimate point to make. Instead, the filmmakers expect us to swallow a sniffly speech from Kate about how she doesn’t want Jack to pursue his dreams of wealth and glory on Wall Street because “the life they love” is right here on Maple Street. You can bet none of those involved with this lively and entertaining film would be caught dead in Jack No. 2′s nameless turnpike community, but they still want to lecture their audience about the value of conformity. “The Family Man” may bear a superficial resemblance to a classic holiday morality tale like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but that’s like saying George W. Bush resembles a real president: Beneath the candy-coated exterior there’s a hollow darkness.

It’s these guys I feel bad for after seeing the lame, faintly agreeable spectacle of “Dungeons & Dragons,” a movie apparently authorized by Wizards of the Coast, the game manufacturer. There’s no real harm, I guess, in making another low-rent fantasy epic that mingles watered-down elements of the Harry Potter series, “Star Wars” and J.R.R. Tolkien. “Dungeons & Dragons” offers a would-be teen heartthrob in the leading role, several modestly enjoyable performances and a few entertaining action sequences. But it’s a weak brew that has none of the game’s intensely absorptive quality and would bore sophisticated 11-year-olds. It might seem about right as a Saturday afternoon offering on the Sci Fi Network. All the dungeon masters, warriors and illusionists out there who have devoted countless late-night hours to D&D have a right to feel disrespected, if not insulted.

Although the special effects in “Dungeons & Dragons” are perfectly acceptable, as fake-o computer graphics go, there’s a certain haphazard quality to the film that derives from many sources. Producer-director Courtney Solomon has never made a movie before, the script by Topper Lilien and Carroll Cartwright consists of material that seems to have eroded away from better films and many of the actors seem to have wandered in from other projects, director’s notes still in hand. As Empress Savina, who hopes to democratize the magical realm of Izmer, Thora Birch still seems to be playing the resentful, affectless daughter in “American Beauty”: All right, yes, the common people should be free, but really she doesn’t give a crap. Sneering English actor Bruce Payne, who’s always a hoot, puts on some white lipstick and a crimson cape and reprises his rather queeny, villainous role from “Highlander: Endgame.”

No one can accuse Jeremy Irons, who plays Profion, the evil magician who hopes to usurp the empress’s power, of being a poor sport. He attacks everyone and everything around him as though he were playing King Lear at a suburban community theater, all goggle-eyes, exaggerated double takes and full-throated oratory. “With a dragon army at my command I can crush the empress!” he cries joyfully, bending at the waist and making little claws out of his hands. Jim Carrey couldn’t have played the part with more gusto. Any sci-fi geek whose memory stretches back to the 1970s will be thrilled and a little saddened to see Tom Baker (best loved of all British TV’s Doctor Whos) in a brief appearance as King of the Elves. His grace and presence momentarily make “Dungeons & Dragons” seem to have the noble ambitions it can only aspire to.

Unhappily, most of the film is concerned not with these peripheral characters, but with Ridley (Justin Whalin) and Snails (Marlon Wayans), a pair of wisecracking thieves whose destiny is to save the world or whatever. With his long, chestnut lashes, cherubic cheeks and silky complexion, Ridley is significantly prettier than his female love interest, a wholesome, magic-wielding librarian named Marina (Zoe McLellan). Along with Whalin’s boy-band cuteness, however, comes a smug, smirking quality that’s undoubtedly meant to communicate high spirits but mainly suggests that neither he nor anybody else involved is taking “Dungeons & Dragons” too seriously.

As for the buffoonish and cowardly Snails, I think Wayans needs to have a talk with Pierre Delacroix, the tortured buppie TV executive played by his brother Damon in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.” Sure, the shuffling, inept sidekick is a Marlon Wayans specialty, but in a genre that offers very few roles for actors of color (and whose fan base, perhaps as a result, is overwhelmingly white) there’s no excuse for trafficking in offensive stereotypes.

Despite their roguish intentions, Ridley and Snails get involved, of course, in defending Empress Savina from Profion’s evil designs. The bar scene from “Star Wars” is ripped off, for the 53rd time in fantasy-film history. Ridley leaps athletically through a maze that features deadly pendulums, jets of fire and rotating knives (a pleasing scene, but a pretty weak effort to capture the flavor of the D&D game). In perhaps the film’s best effect, Snails is sucked into a carpet made of slimy quicksand, only to be retrieved by the nefarious Damodar (Payne), Profion’s lieutenant.

Aided by a lissome elf and a grumpy dwarf, the duo embarks on a quest involving glowing rubies and secret scrolls. (But no, I repeat no magic rings!) Marina decides to help them, and after she kisses Ridley her glasses disappear and her backswept math-girl hairdo is magically transformed into a hipper center-part. Sex, as always, is problematic in this kind of teen-oriented movie; soon thereafter she has an unpleasant semi-erotic encounter with a brain-sucking parasite. Our heroic group must battle Damodar for possession of a powerful thingummy that can control red dragons, which may or may not be bigger and meaner than the regular green kind. The thingummy itself is called a “rod,” but strongly resembles my friend’s old Dragon Bong. (A connection to the true D&D universe at last!)

Internet rumors have suggested that New Line might use “Dungeons & Dragons” to unveil a new trailer for Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, whose first installment is due next Christmas. (If such a trailer is ready, they didn’t show it to critics.) Such an attraction might be the only way to make this movie a hit, but even two minutes of Jackson’s footage are likely to drive home exactly how damp an affair “Dungeons & Dragons” is. I mean, maybe it’s better than “Mortal Kombat 2,” but that’s about the right frame of reference. If you really, really like this kind of thing, you’ve undoubtedly seen worse. But those of you at home with your dungeon charts, stacks of Pink Floyd CDs and fully loaded hookahs are better off staying there. Who knows if that ’78 LeSabre will start in this weather anyhow?