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'Dot the I' lacks any hint of romance, surprise

Introducing a carpet-pulling twist two-thirds into a movie requires paramount grace, a fluid dexterity bordering on legerdemain. First, the drama needs to captivate enough to put us in a hypnotic spell. Then it can go about the dirty work of redefining everything we've just watched with blinding ingenuity, a zapping gotcha. One thinks of "The Sixth Sense," "Fight Club," "Mulholland Drive" — you know, the usual suspects.

Summit Entertainment 'Dot the I' 2 out of 5 stars Director: Matthew Parkhill Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Natalia Verbeke, James D'Arcy, Tom Hardy, Charlie Cox Run time: 92 minutes Release date: March 30, 2005 Rating: R for strong sexuality/nudity, language and some violence. On the web Official movie site Rate "Dot the I"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

"Dot the I" is a thriller with a twist. Actually, it's a pale romantic dramedy that abruptly becomes a thriller in the third act. So it's one-third thriller, two-thirds unimpressive romance and all near miss. The twist, as it is, lands with a thunk, which is what happens when the surprise is not smoothly integrated into the story but rather tacked on as a sophomoric stinger.

Of course, now that we've belabored its existence, the twist is all you'll be looking for watching "Dot the I." Yet unriddling it on your own is all but impossible — that's how contrived and phony it is. You won't see it coming because it's been grafted on, stitches showing. And yet without it, the movie would be a tiresomely familiar love triangle whose reason for existing is as debatable as that of the fire ant.

The movie was made two years ago but only now is being released to cash in on star Gabriel Garcia Bernal's ascendancy in world cinema. Bernal is fine in the London-set story, though it requires the Mexico native to speak with something like a British accent, or perhaps he's just had extensive dental work. While he emanates a facile heat, Bernal's character, Kit, is a psychologically stunted cipher. He's all blank pulchritude.

The women love Bernal, of course, including Natalia Verbeke, who plays Carmen, the married woman he seduces away from her new husband (an excellent, oily James D'Arcy). Verbeke bears the tough beauty — those assertive lips and that pugilist nose — of Jennifer Lopez. She has spine. Her Carmen cheats, one thinks, because Bernal's face, ripe with full features, is an eruption of irresistible sensuality. (Another theory — mine — suggests she cheats because her cuckold's name is Barnaby.)

To Barnaby's slow-burn dismay, Kit and the dimly raffish Carmen plunge into couplehood, or at least bed, leading the husband to a drastic act. The romance goes through the feints, retreats and throes of new love, and this part of the film plays like a trite American teen-romantic comedy, freckled with cutesy humor and mild heartache. For a full hour this goes on before the movie rolls over to reveal its dark and mangy underbelly. This, the big twist, presents the cruel ironies and betrayal found in film noir, and suddenly the movie wears a self-satisfied smirk it hasn't earned.

Director-writer Matthew Parkhill jolts his minor love story into an exercise in self-reflexive gamesmanship. What we've seen isn't what we get, an idea Parkhill castrates by repeating it and verbalizing it. Suddenly, he's making snarky commentary on our obsession with reality TV and home videos, a critique that's exactly as late as the arrival of his film in Austin. Characters, many of whom tote digital camcorders, utter things like "Life is not a movie" and "The camera never lies," cliches that are by turns buttressed and obliterated by the rain of increasingly implausible twists.

For the final 15 minutes of "Dot the I" we can't trust anything we're seeing, but there's no menace or thrill to the uncertainty. There's just confusion, because by now all that twistiness has razed logic and summoned silliness.