It doesn't help much that the story, with its muddled modern moralism, goes nowhere fast. Richard is a footloose young American backpacker who arrives in Bangkok, clearly to check out its "otherness" and, with any luck, find himself in the process. In his cheap hotel he meets Daffy (Robert Carlyle, basically reprising his hothead role from "Trainspotting," only this time making it cartoonish and grating), who tells him about an incredible secluded island, where a secret community of people live in natural harmony, sort of. He then entrusts Richard with a map, which Richard shares with the nice-looking French strangers in the room next door, Etienne and Frangoise (Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen, the French actress who's shown a wonderful crispness in pictures like Benont Jacquot's "A Single Girl" and Olivier Assayas' "Late August, Early September," but who has little to do here). The three set out to find the island together.

They finally reach it, and it ain't easy: A glorious field of pot plants, fiercely guarded by a cadre of gun-toting natives, is just one of the obstacles. Once our three pilgrims have arrived, however, they become entranced by the allegedly content and enlightened group of tree-hugging, fish-spearing individuals who've settled there and the simple life they lead. (The pot guards allow them to stay on the island, on the condition that they don't let anyone else in.) Of course, danger lurks -- you might guess that in the way the group's scary ringleader, the vaguely reptilian Tilda Swinton (wearing a bindi and other types of mysterious face paint, when what she could really use is a good mascara), refuses to let one poor sod go to the mainland to see a dentist. Instead, she allows the other island inhabitants to descend on him with glee, yanking out his bad tooth with a pair of pliers. Foreshadowing? You bet!

But we never understand why Richard and his friends are so taken with this community in the first place, other than the fact that the setting is idyllic. The island inhabitants are a faceless crew. The only one who stands out is Paterson Joseph as Keaty, who, beneath his dreadlocks, is English to the core -- he's still interested enough in civilization to keep up with the cricket scores.

These people are misguided innocents who are nice enough, but basically vapid, as if the movie thinks that's the kind of community Today's Youth Culture desires (and I don't think it is). But there's never enough tension in "The Beach" to make its major conflicts work. The temptation to give in to the more savage side of human nature -- the struggle that Richard himself eventually faces, restaging his own private "Apocalypse Now" inside his muddled head -- ends up being almost completely pointless, nothing more than a vehicle to drive us toward the movie's climax.

And that, too, is woefully inert. In the book, at least you get a nice bloody skirmish. "The Beach" wouldn't be a better movie if it were more visceral, more bloodthirsty, but it would at least make a little more sense. As it is, all we're left to chew on are the age-old themes of man vs. nature, man vs. man and man vs. himself. Maybe it's time he found some new opponents. Or at least started wearing longer pants.

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