Now playing at the Vancouver Centre, Esplanade 6, Richmond, and others

It says in the credits that Sommersby is "based on the film The Return of Martin Guerre", and too many scenes are lifted directly from the original to ignore their inferiority. Not just another revision of successful foreign product, the new movie is a handsomely mounted reductio ad absurdum. With the story's moral intentions pared down to a dull nub, it ends up unsatisfying to all but the least-demanding viewers, regardless of what else they've seen.

Some of the blame belongs to director Jon Amiel, the earnest but easily confused helmsman of British TV's The Singing Detective, who slid downhill through the sentimental Queen of Hearts to the disastrous Tune in Tomorrow. His vision, along with that of Nicholas Meyer and other co-writers, places the tale and its prodigal husband–here dubbed Jack Sommersby–at the close of the American Civil War. Jack (Richard Gere) sweeps into a small Virginia village, knocking sceptical wife Laurel (Jodie Foster) and most of the townsfolk off their already shaky feet (and convincing them to plant tobacco and thus kill off millions of future Americans). The man's a born charmer, and that's a problem, since the pre-war Jack was a non-verbal cad. The ensuing mystery offers potentially fascinating questions about human identity. Can a person change fundamentally, for example, and how much can we really know anyone else? There are no answers here.

The 19th century, of course, is a territory far better known than the Middle Ages of Martin Guerre, a true story in which the title character (whose name implies conflict) leaves as a teenager and returns, a decade later, to a world where men and women still live largely ignorant of each other. Sommersby's leads, however, don't even shuck off their modernist acting enough to transport us back the hundred-odd years that would have been required for them to dig into North American concepts of identity.

Gere comes on as if he were a blunt Brooklyn street vendor aping an unspecific southern accent, and Foster, all pointy and petulant in a braided blonde wig, comes as close as she ever has to a no-think performance. (Her big courtroom scene is good, but you can see that in the trailers.) It's not just that these possible co-conspirators in sexual fraud lack the requisite chemistry–especially next to Guerre's G?rard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye–to bait the film's philosophical hook, but what they do exude is far too familiar to encourage introspection.

More than anything else–including Danny Elfman's surprisingly mundane score and an attitude to black-white relations that says it's possible to have it both ways–what ruins the tale's intriguing premise is the transformation of a compellingly ambiguous protagonist into an almost faultless hero, one who coolly sacrifices himself for the honour of a good name. In the mythlike original, he's a self-interested opportunist who ultimately goes down to save his wife's body and soul. That's a big difference, no matter what epoch you're talking about.