The international success of The Crying Game won Jordan his first Hollywood gig, directing Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire. Fans of the novel complained bitterly about the casting of Cruise in the lead role, but I thought his overbaked performance was just what Anne Rice's prose deserved. The problem was, rather, Jordan's plodding approach to the material. Even middling efforts like Blade or John Carpenter's Vampires crackle with the electricity that pervades the vampire mythos, but Jordan handled it with the stylistic equivalent of insulated rubber gloves. Rather than harnessing the melodrama of his source material, Jordan just diffused it.

In Dreams has similar problems. Jordan's affinity for psychological horror must have led him to this story, which is an uncomfortable porridge of psychic visions, lost children, and serial killing. Mostly, Jordan gets the performances that he needs -- as the reluctant psychic, Annette Bening conveys near-psychotic exasperation perfectly well. And for the first half hour or so, beginning with some lovely underwater footage of divers investigating the ruins of a flooded Massachusetts town, In Dreams is engrossing but not unsettling. Proceedings quickly devolve, though, into a color-by-numbers catch-the-psycho affair, with Bening's visions conveying clues to the ultimate whereabouts of an inveterate child-killer.

Storywise, this is TV movie stuff, or maybe even an episode of The X-Files. If I examined the plot more closely, I might find some internal logic that I missed, but I must confess to finding most of this baffling and thus uninvolving. The second half is particularly tedious -- the film clocks in at well under two hours but feels much, much longer. It's an exercise in foregone conclusions, taking us toward a climax that we can imagine several reels in advance without ever showing us something unexpected along the way.

Finally, I can't understand the critical vogue for praising Robert Downey Jr.'s appearances in mediocre movies. His self-consciously showy performances both in this and in last year's Two Girls and a Guy are diverting, but not particularly credible or meaningful. Downey's main accomplishment may be choosing material that makes him look good in comparison.