Rather disappointingly, "Mortdecai" isn't the flaming catastrophe that its dreadful trailer seems to promise. Still, it's a mess, a failed comedy that's both frantic and leaden — and largely laughless. As a vehicle for Johnny Depp, coming off five years of duds — including "The Tourist," "The Rum Diary," "Dark Shadows" and "The Lone Ranger" — it's another dire misstep along the path of facile muggery and simpering self-regard.

The movie is based on a '70s cult novel by the late English writer Kyril Bonfiglioli, whose specialty was an updated take on the fusty brilliance of P.G. Wodehouse. Bonfiglioli's protagonist, Charlie Mortdecai (Depp's role here), is a dissolute British aristocrat whose fortune is running out. He's down to his last country estate and vintage Rolls; his marriage to the svelte Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow) is falling apart; and he's compelled to take part in shady art dealings to make ends meet. When a priceless Goya painting goes missing, an MI5 officer, named Alistair Martland (Ewan McGregor), calls him in to track it down.

Accompanied by his faithful manservant — whose name, I'm afraid, is Jock Strapp (Paul Bettany) — Mortdecai soon finds himself pinballing from Oxford to Moscow to palmy Los Angeles in the revolving company of an art-smuggling auto mechanic (Paul Whitehouse), a demented revolutionary (Jonny Pasvolsky) and a wily nymphomaniac (Olivia Munn) and her billionaire father (Jeff Goldblum). There are also some mad Russians, a jowly toff described as "the rudest man in England" and a long-dormant Swiss bank account established by the Nazi art thief Hermann Goring.

The tone being striven for here is antic farce — something along the lines of mid-period Blake Edwards, possibly. Director David Koepp has failed to achieve it, though. Koepp, who wrote the unfortunate Indiana Jones fiasco "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," opens this movie with a scene involving Chinese mobsters in a Hong Kong nightclub, which is lifted for no particular reason from the Shanghai opening of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." He then spends the rest of the film trying to maintain our interest in the story's endless idiocy, which involves, among many other things, incessant banter about Mortdecai's silly mustache, which might have been ripped straight off the lip of Hercule Poirot. There's also dialogue that would defeat the most determined performer. Mortdecai observes that "kissing a man without a mustache is like eating an egg without salt." Reminded of his enormous back-tax bill, he says, "I had no idea I was so deep in Her Majesty's hole."

The movie has a swank production design, and some of the actors, especially Bettany, manage to rise to the low occasion. But Depp — one of the film's producers — is a sad sight, negotiating the movie's witless hubbub with a veddy-veddy English accent and a repertoire of inane facial tics that borders on vaudevillian. Unfortunately, this sort of self-indulgent miscalculation is nothing new in his latter-day career. But the man is such an inherently likable performer that we still hope he'll come to his senses, and soon. His vast reservoir of audience goodwill may be nearing depletion.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.