C+

The obvious inspiration for Sophie Barthes’ freshman feature is Charlie Kaufman, and “Cold Souls” will inevitably be seen as a sort of combination of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” But in fact the mood is different; the approach is more sedate and contemplative, and Barthes opts less for the flamboyantly bizarre than Kaufman does, preferring a ruminative matter-of-factness instead. And while the result has a certain quirky charm—mostly due to its star—the overall effect is rather pallid.

The star is Paul Giamatti, who plays a version of himself, an actor of his name rehearsing a production of “Uncle Vanya” in New York and feeling stressed and unsatisfied in his work. Hearing about a service that extracts one’s soul and puts it in storage to free you from the emotional baggage it carries, he goes in for a consultation with the firm’s head honcho, Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who persuades the desperate fellow to give the procedure a try. Soon Giamatti is soulless and less antsy, but also hapless in his craft.

So he returns to the good doctor and is offered the chance to have another soul—chosen from a catalogue the firm obligingly provides—inserted into him. He selects that of a Russian poet, which seems exactly the thing for him, but before long his performance has taken on extravagant dimensions, he begins having weird dreams, and when his wife (Emily Watson) finds out what he’s done, she’s understandably peeved.

The actor’s difficulties link his story up with the second thread of the story, involving Nina (Dina Korzun), a Russian “mule” who brings black-market Russian souls to America, literally inside her. When her thuggish boss’s actress-girlfriend demands the soul of an American star to bolster her career, he has her steal Paul’s and bring it to Russia, where it does in fact improve her soap-opera turn (probably because she’s told it’s Al Pacino’s). But Giamatti, wanting his soul back, is eventually forced to link up with Nina for a dangerous mission to Russia to retrieve it. Things do not go smoothly there, and though the picture maintains a wry sense of humor in these latter stages (as when the duo kidnap the girl and exchange souls using an instruction manual), the tone grows increasingly somber and sad, especially in spinning the tale of the Russian soul’s original donor, a pathetic woman who worked in what amounts to a sweat-shop.

It’s that mixture of the quirkily funny and the poignant that makes “Cold Souls” distinctive, but also diminishes its overall effectiveness. Some scenes, like the extended conversations between Paul and Strathairn, have a dry, understated wit that’s very winning. (A good deal is made of the peculiar shape and size of Giamatti’s soul, which comes out looking like a deformed bean or chickpea, and a scene in which it’s dropped on the floor and has to be carefully searched for is good lowbrow slapstick.) But others, like the rehearsal sequences (with Michael Tucker as the harried director), are overdone and don’t quite work. And still others—those involving the Russian soul-trafficking, especially—have no particular quality at all, serving only to push the plot mechanically forward.

Then there are the darker, brooding moments, mostly in the Russian material but occasionally in the earlier stages too, that seem at odds with the humorous tone elsewhere. The picture’s all about the jostling and mixture of these disparate tones, of course, but the combination never settles, partially because the construction of the script doesn’t achieve the sort of zany logic a piece like this demands (what amounts to the epilogue, in which Homeland Security soldiers and a hedge fund officer are suddenly brought in, seems no more than a desperate device to tie up the narrative). The movie moves in fits and starts, and while there are incidental pleasures along the way, it never fully gels or cuts very deep.

One aspect of it, though, is an unalloyed joy—Giamatti. He, unlike the film, juggles the goofiness and poignancy gracefully in what’s easily his best performance since “Sideways,” and his willingness to allow much of the jokes at his own expense is charming. Apart from Strathairn, who’s perfect as the owlish, unflappable executive, the others don’t add much, with Korzun’s impassivity in particular failing to register. Technically matters are pretty ordinary, too—the production design lacks imagination (the whole extraction and re-insertion process is blandly familiar MRI stuff), and while Andrij Parekh’s cinematography captures the bleak, wintry outdoor images (especially in the Russian scenes), it’s never imaginative in any truly striking fashion. Nor does Dickon Hinchliffe’s score come across as particularly engaging.

And their work is characteristic of what “Cold Souls” has to offer. The premise is very promising, but Barthes doesn’t milk its potential, and even Giamatti’s elfin persona isn’t enough to make up for that.

D-

It isn’t up (or down) to Sony’s notorious scam of creating phony critic David Manning to secure positive quotations for their ads, but Paramount’s cherry-picking of writers—most fan-boy types who could be expected to salivate over the movie—for invitation to pre-screenings of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” while the real critical community was shut out, comes close.

But it has to be admitted that the studio’s decision makes sense. They certainly wouldn’t want audiences to be forewarned that the Stephen Sommers’ picture is practically a compendium of everything that’s wrong with Hollywood action flicks nowadays—a non-stop orgy of cheesy, chaotic CGI effects unencumbered by any human dimension (if you don’t count the laughable flashbacks revealing the characters’ interconnected histories) that’s exclusively suitable for viewing by people whose brains have been warped by constant exposure to video games into expecting a constant barrage of mindless visual stimuli without a single thought to interrupt them beyond “What gets blown up next?” And of course it has to follow the rule established by “Independence Day” that one major landmark must bite the dust in the course of the mayhem. Here it’s the Eiffel Tower, which comes crashing down in a fight that seems to destroy half of Paris. That probably trumps the destruction of the pyramids earlier this season in “Transformers 2.”

“Joe” shares a lineage with “Transformers,”of course, in that it originated with a line of Hasbro toys for which it basically serves as a two-hour advertisement. But its plot—to use the term very loosely indeed—actually derives from the Marvel comic books of the eighties that turned its back on the iconic American soldier figure in favor of an elite international “strike force” that battled a shadowy organization—Cobra—that aimed at, you guessed it, world domination. (Shades of Spectre.)

Here, two grunts—Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans)—are enlisted into the group after the precious cargo they were defending—a matter-eating WMP—has been stolen by its very inventor, Scottish bad-guy McCullen, soon-to-be Destro (Christopher Eccleston), who intends to use it to—you guessed it, conquer the world. They join other squad members—Snake Eyes (Ray Park), Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Breaker (Said Taghmaoui), all under the direction of grumpy General Hawk (Dennis Quaid)—to confront the evil Scotsman and his associates: the Baroness (Sienna Miller), with whom Duke previously had a romance when she was just plain Ana; Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee), who has a past with Snake Eyes; and The Doctor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), master of nano-technology, who was formerly known as Rex, the Baroness’ brother and Duke’s erstwhile buddy. Much fighting and many explosions ensue as the two sides face off. Bam! Pow! Zowie! And, of course, boom!

There’s something really disheartening about all this, especially coming so soon after “Transformers” (which was produced by the same guys). Sure, the effects are okay, if rather cheesily cartoonish—after all, a couple of hundred million bucks goes far in that respect nowadays—but they get tiresome very fast when there’s no sense of invention or imagination behind them (as there was, for instance, in last year’s “Wanted”). All the bombast comes across as rote and uninspired.

And it’s truly depressing to encounter talented young performers like Tatum, Miller and Gordon-Levitt wasting their time on characters that might as well have been played by mannequins. (For heaven’s sake, Gordon-Levitt’s still lighting up the screen in “(500) Days of Summer.” Here he’s mostly stuck behind a mask so much, a bargain-basement version of Darth Vader, that a stand-in could be doing 90% of his scenes. Not a bad idea.) Quaid has the opportunity to growl out some orders, and Wayans—the comic-relief fellow—the chance to play the fool, though it’s less than sensitive to have the black guy always doing this shtick (and his repeated references to Duke as “my boy” are positively creepy after awhile). But certainly the filmmakers could have found somebody other than Jonathan Pryce to play the U.S. President. Not only is a reptilian figure like him unlikely ever to get elected (people seemed to have learned their lesson from Nixon), but he’s not even native-born. Sic the Birthers on him! (The Prexy is also involved in a cliff-hanging ending in concert with a badguy named Zartan, played by Arnold Vosloo, which is the invitation to a sequel—heaven help us).

“G.I. Joe” will probably make a lot of cash (although the gung-ho American connotation of the title may tamp down attendance abroad)—after all, if a piece of junk like “Transformers” can be a huge hit, why not this? It’s just as bad—or good, if brainless rubbish is your cup of tea.

At one point in the movie, Baroness/Ana says to the captured Duke, “Everybody’s sorry for something.” Paramount neede’t be sorry for withholding “G.I. Joe” from the critics, but the studio should feel ashamed for releasing it at all.