Grade: C

Verdict: Lots of “le pant le pant, le puff le puff” in a melodrama that's both overheated and tepid.

Details: Starring Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie.Written and directed by Michael Cristofer. Rated R for strong sexual content and some violence. One hour, 56 min.

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Review: Neither a turkey nor a triumph, “Original Sin” hits screens after being repeatedly shelved by MGM. As a final insult to the filmmakers, studio honchos wanted to slip it into theaters without showing it to critics, but changed their minds at the last sec.

That's a tactic usually reserved for a movie they know will make a fortune regardless of reviews, or a stinker they can smell all the way up in their Hollywood Hills homes.

“Sin” won't break the bank, but it's not totally rotten. It's muddled, unintentionally laughable at times, and feels more like a pageant of actors playing fancy dress-up rather than a fully lived-in movie. Call it a boudoir noir, a blend of double-crossing plot twists and the perpetual heave of star Angelina Jolie's tightly corseted breasts.

“Sin” starts with Jolie in jail — or her lips anyway, shot in closeup and emphasizing their swollen, almost grotesque appearance; you halfway expect them to get separate billing. (The same goes for Antonio Banderas's bare butt, which pulls its own share of screen time.)

Awaiting execution, Jolie explains how she wound up behind bars. See, Banderas plays Luis, a Cuban coffee plantation owner who advertises for a mail-order American wife. She arrives in the form of Julia (Jolie), a Delaware stunner whose face doesn't match the photo she sent, and whose personal habits don't quite gel with things she told Luis in her letters.

But who cares? She's great in bed, and the movie gives us plenty of soft-focus, Victoria Secret-style rolling around in lustrous linens. Betrayal and plot reversals follow, and soon Banderas is pursuing his duplicitous beauty across the island. See, he loves her, he hates her, she must die, she must be his, etc.

There's an old-fashioned dose of sexual obsession here, a little like “Vertigo.” Actually “Sin” is based on the Cornell Woolrich novel “Waltz into Darkness,” previously filmed by Francois Truffaut in 1969's “Mississippi Mermaid.” Truffaut's version, set in contemporary times, starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve, cannily using her gorgeous, vaguely amoral coolness as a key to the movie's dry, existential folie à deux. With “Sin,” writer-director Michael Cristofer (Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of “The Shadow Box”) goes instead for a muted opulence. Setting the tale in the 19th century, he muffles some of the story's edge under all the crinolines.

Cristofer, who pushed Jolie closer to fame directing her in “Gia,” clearly adores the actress and shoots her beautifully. But he lets her play more of an icon than a real person; from the start, her Julia spouts aphorisms with a come-hither smolder. She's such a vamp, it's surprising Luis doesn't smell a rat earlier.

Banderas gives the film what emotional dimension it has, and he's convincing as a hopelessly smitten lover. He and Jolie manage to kick the movie fully awake halfway through with a violent confrontation. But their starpower can't overcome the catastrophic casting of Thomas Jane as a private eye, a crucial, complex character who needs an actor offering more than Jane's smirky performance.

For all its lushness and melodramatics, “Original Sin” is never the good-bad guilty pleasure it could be. It's both overripe and juiceless. The plot becomes increasingly haphazard, the settings more claustrophobic. And the twists and turns seem to go on way too long. Partly that's due to Cristofer's propensity for camera tricks. He relies too heavily on slo-mo, reverberating sound and wheeling camera movements for no good reason. What's meant to be style becomes a show of distracting visual tics.

Then there's all those scary closeups of Jolie's lips. Plenty of folks may have thought about kissing those lips. “Original Sin” lets you experience what it might be like to be eaten alive by them. In one gulp.

— Steve Murray, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution