Since I hardly know where to begin telling you what's wrong with The End of Violence, the new English-language film by German director Wim Wenders, I'm going to start by telling you what's right.

The spoken word poetry bits, dropped confidently into the narrative, are actually pretty good. There's a new Tom Waits song on the soundtrack. I giggled aloud at the scene where a Hollywood producer on the lam makes a covert visit to Kinko's, camouflaged by his posse of Mexican gardeners, to check his email. The demonic Udo Kier has a delightful cameo as a crusty European director who never should have come to Hollywood, and Traci Lind, playing a beautiful stuntwoman-turned-ingenue, is like a pipeline of oxygen into this mouldering, many-chambered mausoleum of an art film.

Is that it? The End of Violence is another Wenders rumination on the nature of modern American society, and maybe it's just one too many. I'm a huge Wenders fan -- I even liked Until the End of the World -- but the more literal he gets, the more he confounds my innate affection for most everything he does. If the insufferable Faraway, So Close! was an embarrassment, then The End of Violence is a disaster.

It begins with a self-conscious declaration of purpose: "Define violence," one character orders another. The character is a stuntwoman named Cat (Lind) in a new film produced by Hollywood mogul Mike Max (Bill Pullman, as flappable as ever). The moment will be broken by an explosion that rips a chunk out of her cheek; Max will visit her in the hospital and decide to cast her in the lead role of his new ultraviolent opus, Seeds of Violence. Meanwhile, Max's wife Paige Stockard (Andie MacDowell) has informed him by cel phone -- from the house just a stone's throw away -- that she's leaving him.

Before long, one painfully unfunny scene finds Max bargaining for his life, having been kidnapped by a pair of bumbling thugs who argue with each other until Max, seeking leverage, offers them points on the gross of his new film. This whole encounter is watched over by Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne), the caretaker of some top-secret government project seeking to monitor the streets of Los Angeles with high-tech surveillance cameras (his control room is in Griffith Observatory). The transmission is interrupted at a crucial moment, so that neither Bering nor the audience sees exactly what happens down on the ground that fells both of the crooks and allows Max to run away into the L.A. night. (In an effective twist, he takes refuge with his gardener's family.) An idealistic cop (Loren Dean) investigates Max's disappearance -- and the murder of his two kidnappers -- and finds himself drawn closer and closer to Cat (who is still, at the film's conclusion, trying to find that special someone who can "define violence" for her).

Wenders' film is less successful at defining "violence" than at showing its lasting (if unconvincing) effects on character. Max is forced into a more modest, but apparently fulfilling, existence; Paige sleeps with a rap star and becomes empowered to run Max's production company all on her own; Cat comes to terms with disappointment; and Bering learns that surveillance is a two-way street. Unfortunately, these stories are ridden by cliched situations, stilted dialogue, and humdrum romanticism. ("Do you think feelings, tensions, bad thoughts, can have an effect on reality like sort of unintentional prayers?" one character asks another. "Definitely," comes the answer.) Even the movie's one heart-stopping burst of real violence only reinforces the idea that the director is scrambling to find his focus.

Until the End of the World suffered from many of the same shortcomings, but The End of Violence doesn't have that movie's scope or sense of purpose. Worse, it doesn't have that movie's cast. In reviewing Wings of Desire, I noted that Wenders and his company of actors have come to seem like friends over the years. It's hard to imagine Lisbon Story without the cockeyed warmth of Rudiger Vogler in the lead role, and Faraway, So Close! gains a lot of goodwill by reuniting the cast from Wings of Desire. By contrast, The End of Violence suffers mightily in its casting of Andie MacDowell, perhaps the worst actor ever to be rated so highly by her peers, in an important role. Pullman isn't a lot better for my money, though his legion of admirers will enjoy seeing him here. Byrne is an able performer who's not given much to do, and Dean is, well, a little too earnest for words.

They're all struggling mightily with insipid dialogue that, I guess, is angling for the same kind of poetry-speak that has served earlier Wenders films well. The narrative feels as though it's just a bunch of scenes written out on note cards, then shuffled and reshuffled in an attempt to make everything work. Advance word was that after The End of Violence tanked at Cannes, Wenders had taken the criticism to heart and had toned up his bloated new movie, so I shudder to think what the original cut looked like (Lind recently said that some of her scenes were added back into the final cut of the film, which can't have been a bad idea).

There are a couple of half-hearted admonitions aimed at the violence of American pop culture, but all in all the film is way too diffuse to make its points stick. The End of Violence has its vociferous admirers, including a small but enthusiastic pocket of fans that broke into applause at the film's end on Saturday night. A few seats away from them, it was all I could do to stay awake.