Lem Dobbs' screenplay for Kafka was, for a while, one everyone liked but no one wanted to make. Like Bruce Joel Rubin's Jacob's Ladder. Until, that is, a young film-maker called Steven Soderbergh, hot off the back of sex, lies and videotape, caught sight. The result, shot in Prague with an all star cast, caused such ruination that his career has never fully recovered.

Dobbs also co-authored this, a second feature for Alex Proyas, helmer of vacuous cult item The Crow. Not that anyone would be surprised, not with its dark dealings in a shadowy metropolis, its mental engineering, and its Kafkian innocent adrift in a maze of conspiracy. Dark City is the multiplex remix of Soderbergh's underrated picture. And not as good.

This innocent is called Murdoch and is played by the remarkably ordinary Refus Sewell. He awakens in a hotel bath in a strange city with no idea who or where he is. Quickly there are an estranged wife (Jennifer Connelly), a doctor (Kiefer Sutherland) who claims to be treating him, and the police, in the shape of Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt, thrown away), who would like a chat on account of the mutilated hooker in his hotel room. And then there are those mysterious bald, black-clad strangers who float about the city, seemingly intent on murder. And why does the city shut down at midnight each night, when the population fall unconscious and new buildings suddenly stand where others did previously?

The film cleverly pitches its audience in at the deep end, setting us almost as adrift (there is an opening monologue that feels tacked on) as Murdoch. We are expected to decode his world (shades of Jacob’s Ladder, perhaps), at least until we switch out to meet Sutherland's doctor (twitchy, showy but insubstantial) and the Strangers, the alien race who control the gigantic machinery beneath the city. By taking us away from Murdoch's confusion, the film explains too much, exchanging mystery for muddle.

It's a narrative gaff that effectively hobbles anything that follows. Even a potentially involving subplot, in which a Stranger (Richard O'Brien) is injected with Murdoch's personality and learns what it is to become human, is sidelined. And Connelly suggests she might be good, were she ever given the chance. All of which means the film is left to stand or fall on its effects: Proyas is not an actor's director.

And nor, indeed, is he an original one -- that's obvious from the moment, a couple of minutes in, when a goldfish bowl performs a slo-mo crash to the floor. If you get bored with Dark City's infuriating opacity, then at least you can pass the time in the dark by ticking off the steals in Proyas' magpie cinema. The Strangers, all dome heads and leather, are Barkerian Cenobites by any other name, and in its darker recesses the city itself cannot help but remind us of the titular destination of Hellraiser's insipid first sequel. There's a retro-noir feel that summons the ghost of Blade Runner (again), and a monumental quality borrowed without license from Anton Furst's striking designs for the first Batman. The midnight remodelling (or tuning, if you must) is by way of Gilliam's Brazil. Even when it escapes quoting other movies, the best Dark City can offer is old Edward Hopper paintings.

This is sturm und drang cinema. Any hint at humanity or complication is effectively smothered at birth by yet another deluge of (not always) special effects. It's an art movie given over to technicians who think inconsistencies can just be papered over with noise. They can't, and even the potentially enigmatic ending is badly fumbled. Dobbs got this story right the first time, and you would be better off looking for Kafka on tape than wasting time on this still-birth.