Directed by Mira Nair, Fatih Akin, Wen Jiang, and others. Starring Natalie Portman, Bradley Cooper, Christina Ricci, and Hayden Christensen. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, March 5, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

As with its predecessor, Paris, je t’aime, from the same creator, New York, I Love You is a very uneven work. In this case, most of the mixed blessings come in the first third, making the film an increasingly draggy experience.

Overall, the collection plays very much as the work of outsiders offering fairly naive impressions of the world’s most frequently filmed city. That’s not bad in itself, but the golly-gee factor wears thin, especially when the observations feel not just superficial but misleading and/or arbitrary in nature.

Allen Hughes’s whirlwind lustathon on wheels, with Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo missing each other in transit, could happen in any town with taxis. And Wen Jiang’s playful piece, with Hayden Christensen hustling Rachel Bilson from bigger hustler Andy Garcia, unfolds mostly in one room. On the other hand, some NYC–specific tales feel suffocatingly precious, as in Mira Nair’s vision of a Hasidic-Hindu romance in the Diamond District, starring ill-matched Irrfan Khan and Natalie Portman—with the latter directing her own, so-so segment about mixed ethnicity.

Much richer is German-born Turkish director Fatih Akin’s take on Chinatown, with an aged painter (Ugur Yí¼cel) longing for a mysterious beauty (Shu Qi). And Orlando Bloom, as a struggling film composer in Shunji Iwai’s short story, guides us through some funky urban pleasures as he searches for a woman (Christina Ricci) he only knows by voice. Best, and most New York, of all is a vignette with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as an ancient couple shuffling through one of their last visits to Coney Island.

Far too much of the film, though, feels disconnected from the rest and too weakly conceived to carry much weight. Rio, Jerusalem, and Shanghai are the next cities due for this cinematic treatment d’amour; we only hope they can take it.