THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL

Directed by Wim Wenders. Starring Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Peter Starmore

A WORK of such complete and utter meaninglessness as to border on the profound, Million Dollar Hotel is by some measure Wim Wenders' most pretentious, most self-indulgent and least affecting work to date, although we'd probably accept it from just about anyone else.

As perversely absorbing as it is aimless, the film stops just short of being an out-and-out disaster - it's quirkily original enough to keep half a grip on the attention, and never quite descends into abject awfulness. But measured against the poetic resonance of Paris Texas or Wings Of Desire, it's a deep disappointment - visually arresting, but no more emotionally involving than your average Aussie daytime soap-opera.

Conceived by a reasonably well-known Irish rock singer, renowned for being the brother of Norman Hewson, Hotel's impossibly vague plot runs something like this: a junkie dies in mysterious circumstances, having apparently flung himself off the roof of the titular hotel, whereupon his billionaire father hires a corrupt FBI agent to investigate (Mel Gibson, in a wholly unconvincing bid for left-field credibility).

Gibbo's interrogations bring him face-to-face with a weirdo collection of borderline lunatics, and a whodunnit murder-mystery ensues, only to be totally obscured by a multitude of completely pointless subplots.

These include a puzzling romance between gawky simpleton Tom-Tom (Davies) - the apparent hero of the piece - and shy freak-chick Eloise (Jovovich) who are two of the most irritating specimens you've ever seen in your life, and heartily deserve one another.

Meanwhile, a host of lunatics babble endlessly all movie long, to hugely annoying effect. The most grievious offender is Peter Stormare's character - a bespectacled beardy mess who harbours psychotic delusions of being the fifth Beatle, is convinced that he wrote all their songs, and is singularly incapable of mouthing a sentence without lapsing into Scouse-accented Beatle lyric.

In all honesty, the film has only two saving graces: Jovovich's perfectly-formed mouth, and a Bono-penned soundtrack which showcases the singer at his most tenderly torch-noir melodic, most strikingly on the awesome 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' (written by, of all people, Salman Rushdie). Whether either phenomenon is worth your precious time and money is a different matter altogether: Wenders freaks will doubtless flock to it, but the rest of us are in for something of an endurance test.