Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace (John Baer/FilmDistrict)

“Life is what happens to you along the way,” says Darcy (Dominic Cooper) as he cradles an infant in his arms. “I didn’t want to connect,” he continues, to the silent understanding eyes of his friend Victor (Colin Farrell). Dead Man Down, the first American film from Niels Arden Oplev, director of the original adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opens with an explosion — of platitudes. Screenwriter J. H. Wyman (Fringe) seems to have generated dialogue from a cliché machine set on random and repeat. “Live your life. You’re alive, after all.” “Even the most damaged heart can be mended. Even the most damaged heart.”

The most damaged, damaged hearts belong to Victor and Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), who in the middle of this apparent crime drama, meet cute. The pair wave to each other from their apartment balconies before Beatrice takes a chance and invites the big-eyed stranger to get Chinese. It’s a bad sign when the strongest parts of a talky script are its awkward silences, but Victor and Beatrice’s first date is one of the few scenes in the movie that almost work, if only because you hear less of Wyman’s ridiculous dialogue. On the other hand, unintelligible dialogue does not help marble-mouthed Armand Assante’s scene with crime boss Alphonse (Terrence Howard, who must feel like he’s stumbled onto another Glitter).

The damage to Beatrice is external as well. Her face was disfigured in a car crash, and as Victor drives her home after dinner, she shows her hand. She wants Victor to kill the man whose drunk driving caused her pain. You see, she knows what Victor has been up to. Beatrice pulls out her smartphone and shows Victor footage of him killing a man in his apartment. When did this happen and why? The movie pulls murder out of a hat and just as quickly ignores it, serving up an incoherent plot of overlapping revenge cobbled together from Strangers on a Train and Rear Window thrown into a blender, led by a character whose name is taken from Casablanca. (Note the production company’s name, Original Film).

Luis DaSilva, Dominic Cooper and Terrence Howard (John Baer/FilmDistrict)

The actors keep this ridiculous show somewhat watchable, though you have to wonder how long Farrell is going to keep his agent. It wasn’t that long ago that the actor was starring in less commercial material, like the John Fante adaptation Ask the Dust, and Farrell was heartbreaking as a gangster with a conscience in Martin McDonough’s In Bruges. But his recent output has included poorly received remakes of Total Recall and Fright Night, and his reunion with McDonough in Seven Psychopaths was by all accounts a mis-step on a par with the playwright#8217;s terrible Broadway pastiche A Behanding in Spokane. Isabelle Huppert is wasted as Beatrice’s hard-of-hearing mother, who kindly offeres her daughter’s new beau lemon chicken and cookies (imagine, as I often do at the movies these days, Werner Herzog in this thankless role). The movie reunites Oplev with Noomi Rapace, the original Lisbeth Salander. Rapace must feel she owes her former director a favor, since it’s too easy to imagine the actress returning to her breakout character, kidnapping her screenwriter and tattooing into his stomach, “I AM A HACK.”

In the inevitable conclusion, Darcy puts the last pieces of a puzzle together for his boss Alphonse. It’s a puzzle that everyone in the audience figured out in the first five minutes of the movie. Dead Man Down was bankrolled by WWE in collaboration with Original Film and Frequency Films, and as each of their logos and unironic company names unspools on the screen, the promise of quality entertainment dies a little more. Yes, that WWE. If the filmmakers had invested a fraction of the drama and pacing of a typical steel-cage match into Dead Man Down, it might have been a decent entertainment. But I swear, 21 and Over is a smarter movie.

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Dead Man Down
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev.
Written by J.H. Wyman
With Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Terrence Howard, Dominic Cooper, Isabelle Huppert.
Rated R for violence, language throughout and a scene of sexuality
Running time 110 minutes