Grade: F

Bad girl, worse movie. Brian De Palma has always had style to burn, but only occasionally (“Carrie,” “Blow Out,” “The Untouchables,” “Casualties of War”) has it been applied to material which added heart to the glossily bewitching surface. More often (“Sisters,” “Obsession,” “The Fury,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Mission Impossible”) it’s been put to the service of screenplays that are essentially empty pulp made pleasurable by the verve and imagination of the presentation. And in a few really dismal cases, it’s been wasted on simply awful scripts–often thrillers penned by the director himself.

Sadly, “Femme Fatale” falls into the third category; shot in France, it comes across as a piece of dumb, garish Eurotrash, along the lines of Stephan Elliot’s equally silly and impenetrable “Eye of the Beholder” (1999). It’s ostensibly the tale of Laure (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), a female master thief who double-crosses her cohorts after a big score at the Cannes Film Festival, switches identities, goes off to America, returns to France as the wife of the US ambassador to France, and then falls in with Nicolas (Antonio Banderas), a paparazzo whom she manipulates in an effort to extricate herself from the threats arising from her past. The operative word here, however, is “ostensibly,” since part of the cinematic puzzle turns out to be (in a twist that most viewers will consider a gross cheat) that some of what we see is “real” and some not. The fundamental difficulty with this contrivance isn’t merely that the pileup of coincidences and logical lapses grows crushing by the time the surprise denouement rolls around (the script could charitably be described as implausibility squared), but that since the entire film is shot in a thoroughly dreamlike and hallucinatory style, it’s impossible to distinguish between what we’re intended to take as actual occurrence and what’s just imaginary. Flips in chronology and visual perspective, along with the director’s patented split screens and deliberately weird camera moves, make things even less comprehensible. From the standpoint of narrative coherence, another problem is that if we take the action literally, a good deal of the story must be set in 2008, although it never ceases to look absolutely contemporary.

But trying to apply ordinary standards of intelligibility to “Femme Fatale” is a hopeless task. In plot terms, one can observe that ultimately the picture makes sense in terms of ultimately linking things together, but that as a whole it makes no sense at all. The idiotically intricate construction is merely an excuse for De Palma not only to indulge in all his customary flourishes, but to raise all of them to a level that’s almost preternaturally extravagant. The picture is largely composed of laborious allusions to the work of his idols–Hitchcock, mostly (there’s a gob of “Vertigo” here, a dash of “Psycho” there, accompanied by a score from Ryuichi Sakamoto that’s mostly composed of Herrmannesque drones in the lower strings), but also the Billy Wilder of “Double Indemnity” (from which we see a French-subtitled scene at the very start)–but even more of homages to his own past work (it gets to be a bit like bird-watching: there’s “Dressed To Kill,” there’s “Blow Out,” there’s the aquarium from “Mission Impossible”); by the end it’s come to seem an exercise in self-parody. The effect is accentuated by the film’s structure: it’s basically a string of elaborate set-pieces of the sort that have worked brilliantly when used sparingly in previous De Palma efforts but, when arbitrarily thrown together en masse as here, come across like the tired tricks of a magician who doesn’t recognize that the audience can see every sleight of his hand. The opening jewelry-theft sequence, a flamboyant fifteen-minute sequence accompanied by a faux-Ravel bolero, encapsulates what’s wrong. Though meticulously staged and shot, it seems a pale reflection of what De Palma’s done far better before, and to make matters worse, it’s entirely pointless. There’s no reason why the whole scheme has been arranged in so absurdly complicated a fashion, or what point there is to the steamy sensuality that’s inserted into the action–except, of course, as a source of empty titillation.

Under these circumstances the actors flounder. The casting of Romijn-Stamos might be taken as another nod to Hitchcock: she proves as beautiful but vacuous as Kim Novak was in “Vertigo,” but De Palma doesn’t have the skill to mold her performance the way Hitch did Novak’s. As a result she has the singular distinction of being an actress who plays two roles in a single film, and manages to be terrible in both. (In fairness, though, she looks great on the numerous occasions when she strips down to her lingerie.) Banderas seems totally flat and lost, except in one truly embarrassing scene in which he has to adopt a prissy persona when Nicolas invades Laure’s hotel room. Peter Coyote appears briefly as the ambassador who weds Laure, and Gregg Henry even more so as a singularly inept security officer. (For some reason the latter is also glimpsed early on in an elevator scene–whether as a meaningless joke or a clumsy red herring is hard to say). Eriq Ebouaney, who was so impressive in “Lumumba,” proves that he can sneer with the best (or worst) of them as one of Laure’s nasty cohorts.

Technically “Femme Fatale” is gaudily eye-catching, but ultimately all the flash and pizzazz of Thierry Arbogast’s cinematography is wearying rather than exhilarating. And even were the surface more entrancing, it wouldn’t make up for the gross miscalculations in writing and casting. In the De Palma oeuvre, the picture ranks toward the very bottom, somewhere between “Body Double” and “Raising Cain” and the one hand and “Mission to Mars” on the other.

B-

Eight years is a long gestation period for a sequel nowadays, but a substantial hiatus is no guarantee of quality–after all, it took half a decade to devise last summer’s thoroughly pedestrian “Men in Black II.” The time has been better spent in putting together “The Santa Clause 2.” The second installment of Tim Allen’s first (and most successful) big screen enterprise thus far doesn’t have as high a bar to reach as Barry Sonnenfeld’s picture did–after all, the original 1994 flick was hardly a classic. It was, however, a reasonably clever family film which nicely combined slapstick and warmth; and the good holiday news is that the new movie, smoothly directed by Michael Lembeck, comes close to matching it. Parents can take their kids to “The Santa Clause 2” with confidence that the children should be content and they themselves mildly amused.

The basic premise is one that goes back cinematically at least to Buster Keaton, and dramatically a lot further than that–about a fellow who has to find a bride quickly. In the case of Scott Calvin (Tim Allen), the ordinary joe who became Santa in the initial movie, he learns that he has to marry by Christmas Eve–not for fear of losing a big inheritance, like the hero of “Seven Chances,” but of being forced to give up the job he’s learned to love. Scott’s return from the North Pole, however, has a second purpose as well: to help his son Charlie (Eric Lloyd), whose rebelliousness at school has earned the ire of his no-nonsense principal, Carol Newman (Elizabeth Mitchell). It comes as no surprise that it will be Ms. Newman that Scott romances while getting his son back on the right track. But there’s yet another wrinkle: to keep the toy factory humming in his absence, Scott lets himself be talked into creating a plastic duplicate of himself to run the Pole in his stead. Unfortunately, the replica (also played by Allen, in heavy makeup) grows rigidly rule-obsessed, and before long he’s turned into a petty dictator. Scott, Carol and Charlie will have to get back to Santa’s village in time to defeat the fake Claus and his minions and arrange a quick marriage ceremony if kids are to receive presents rather than lumps of coal on the big morning.

Two out of the three elements present in this composite work quite well. The romantic plot, though predictable enough–Scott and Carol are like oil and water at the start, and it’s only gradually that she warms to him after much banter and bickering–develops some genuine warmth, largely because Allen and Mitchell make a good team. The script builds a few too many heart-tugging, ostentatiously magical moments into their courtship, but they still carry them off. The relationship between Scott and Charlie is okay too, even if the reasons behind the kid’s attitude come across as artificial. Unfortunately, the business about the renegade duplicate grows far too loud and frenetic to afford much pleasure. As played, in the broadest strokes and the most stentorian tones, by Allen, the latex Santa is, with the exception of a few moments (for example, a football game in which he demolishes some elves), an obnoxious bore. That means that the latter part of the picture has more low points than high ones. Some may also take umbrage at the commercial conception of Christmas that underlies the plot, with its emphasis on gift-giving–but it’s hard to imagine how any movie about Santa could avoid that (even “Miracle on 34th Street” didn’t, in the end).

And there are compensations. Allen has the gruff charm bit down pat, and Mitchell moves easily from hard-edged administrator to sweet helpmate. Lloyd remains a likable fellow, though he’s grown a lot over eight years, and Judge Reinhold and Wendy Crewson have fun with the stiffness of his mother and stepdad. On the North Pole front, David Krumholtz and Spencer Breslin will delight the tykes in the audience, as will the animatronic/animated reindeer, especially the wacky Comet; adults will probably be more taken with the other legendary figures–Mother Nature, the Easter Bunny, Cupid, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy–who show up to confer with Santa over common problems. Art Lafleur is especially winning as the Tooth Fairy, who becomes one of the heroes of the narrative toward the close. Disney is probably working on a spinoff script for him already.

On the technical side, “The Santa Clause 2” is impressive. The North Pole has been lovingly imagined and realized, and the wintry scenes back in the “real world” have a touch of old- fashioned elegance, too. The art direction (by Sandy Cochrane) and production design (by Tony Burrough) combine to create a similar (though not so odd) sort of landscape to that which most audiences found so fetching in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Unfortunately, the whole Bad Santa episode in this picture is reminiscent of the more frantic, oversized aspects of that Jim Carrey holiday flick, too. Happily, there’s enough in “Santa Clause 2” on more modest and human a scale to offset the coarser elements. Like its predecessor, it’s no classic, but it provides a reasonably attractive holiday contraption, one that families looking for a clean, kid-friendly outing should investigate.