C-

One of the supernatural characters in Agustin Diaz Yanes’ brittle otherworldly fantasy remarks to another at one point, “Are things that bad?” The response is, “Worse than you think.” The exchange is an apt commentary on the picture itself.

“Don’t Tempt Me” is one of those numerous cinematic contraptions which depict the forces of heaven and/or hell intruding in human affairs. It’s an old device used in such varied fare as “Heaven Can Wait” (both versions), “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” “Defending Your Life” and “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” to mention only a few examples. The crux of things in this case is a battle between representatives of both sides of the after-death divide over the soul of a single person, in this case an over-the-hill boxer named Manny (Demian Bichir). But the hook in the depiction of the afterlife is that paradise and the abode of the damned are portrayed as big corporations, with many levels of management keeping ledgers computing the relative success of the rival ventures. Each place also has a unique ambiance: heaven is a sophisticated nightclub where the language is French, with a forties-style look (it’s shot in black-and-white to accentuate the atmosphere), while hell is a gritty, industrial-cellar warehouse apparently set in the middle of a blistering desert (and appropriately lacking air conditioning); there English is the language of choice, even though it’s often spoken with a thick accent.

That’s a fairly nifty set-up, and had it been married to a clever plot the picture might have taken off. Unfortunately, the script turns out to be a contrived, witless piece of work. For some reason, never explained, the future of the whole good-and-evil system in operation in the world hinges on Manny’s fate. Heaven, we’re informed, is running out of new recruits and becoming depopulated; the situation is so dire that The Big Guy is AWOL in a funk. This leaves Marina D’Angelo (Fanny Ardant) in functional charge, and she dispatches Lola Nevado (Victoria Abril), a heavenly chanteuse, to earth to impersonate the boxer’s wife and persuade him to perform one act that will merit salvation–namely apologizing to his long-estranged mother. Meanwhile things are not well in corporate Hades, either. Though we’re told that it’s overflowing with newcomers, its chief, a guy named Davenport (Gael Garcia Bernal) has sniffed out an effort to depose him unless he secures Manny’s soul, and so he dispatches his sultriest agent, the ravishing temptress Carmen (Penelope Cruz), to impersonate Manny’s cousin, move in with him and Lola, and foil her efforts to convert him to the good side. Eventually Marina, Davenport, Lola and Carmen will form an unlikely partnership because–as Davenport tells it–if the coup against him succeeds, the new demonic hierarchy will change the soul-snatching game and drive heaven out of business altogether.

Now none of this makes any sense on even the most rudimentary level, and even the wildest fantasy needs to play by some sort of coherent rules. But even going beyond that basic problem, the script goes awry in a whole variety of ways. Carmen, for example, is initially portrayed as a beautiful broad with lesbian tendencies, but it’s ultimately revealed that she’s actually a male gangster, turned into a female as part of his hellish punishment. That’s pretty tasteless in itself, but the sourness is accentuated when, toward the close, Manny suspects that she and Lola are sexually involved. His angry, violent reaction is typical of his character–which is an even more fundamental flaw. Manny is, quite simply, a boorish thug, such a singularly stupid, unsavory lump of machismo that it’s absolutely impossible to sympathize with him or to believe that he has (or even should have) the slightest chance of redemption. He stole money that his mother was saving for his brother’s education, belts women when provoked, and is heavily in debt to a loan shark whose demands for payment are enforced by a couple of slimy crooked cops. (Lola and Carmen will ultimately join forces to get the money to pay them off by robbing a supermarket where both were fired by the unscrupulous owners–a scene that aims to be a feminist “Pulp Fiction” and fails miserably.) Manny also refuses to stop fighting although he’s informed by doctors that one more punch would kill him. The natural reaction for a viewer to have is simply: sock the bum!

Bichir is no prize as an actor, either, so the character becomes doubly difficult to endure: his sullenness and dyspepsia prove infectious. The others are better, but not by much. Abril is adequate but arch, and while Ardant wears her fine wardrobe well, her impassivity grows tiresome. Bernal tries to act the slick, slimy weasel but is too young and inexperienced to pull off the charade. As for Cruz, she’s certainly voluptuous–a “Risky Business”-derived sequence in which she wiggles in front of her bedroom mirror to the radio as she dresses generates some heat–but she once again shows little affinity for comedy. Technically the movie is more than adequate; some of the design has a good deal more panache than the dreary dialogue or the stilted situations, and the cinematography is often quite evocative. But style can’t trump substance.

At another point in “Don’t Tempt Me” Lola belts out a tune titled “I Want To Be Bad.” Sadly, that could be the movie’s theme song.