"Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values." (Underworld, Don DeLillo)

Although on its surface The End of Violence would appear the very antithesis of everything David Cronenberg's Crash stood for, it is not overly invidious to call for comparison. After all, what is Crash really about?

Of course car crashes and sex and the rest The Daily Mail cautioned (well, excepting maybe the paedophilia), but more than that it's about the disenfranchised. Jim and Catherine Ballard are propelled, by events initially beyond their control, into a nether world existing outside of society: an outer shell from which we are visited by strange angels like hoodlum scientist Vaughan. Crash is, therefore, as much a film about reinvention of the self as it is even a cautionary celebration of sex and death.

So why must we drag poor Wim Wenders into our argument? Well, the debate is two-fold. Crash is not a violent film; if he was adamant about nothing else, its Canuck helmer was adamant on that score. No guns, no knives, no non-consensual sex. And yet its very nature ensures that it is a meditation on violence, both in society and the movies. We are asked, implicitly, in watching sequences like the final, breathtaking chase of the Ballards through Toronto's rainswept concrete canyons, to think about all the other times we have seen the same scene enacted as entertainment: what they mean. In The End of Violence, Wenders and scripter Nicholas Klein are asking these same questions - and no less obliquely.

And disenfranchisement? Now that, more than anything, forms the new film's political core. One in which wealthy action film producer Mike Max's life is turned upside down one day by extraordinary events. Like a 400-page FBI file on covert surveillance crashing his email account without warning, just as wife Paige (Andie McDowell) calls up to say she's leaving. The first intrigues, the latter baffles. Then, later that same day, Mike Max is kidnapped by a pair of bickering hitmen who drive him out to a patch of wasteground with murder in mind.

Only, as day dawns again over Los Angeles, there are two corpses beneath the freeway, neither belonging to the producer. The police swiftly clear him of responsibility, but in the meantime he's been absorbed by the city, hitching up quite happily with a family of Chicano gardeners.

Much of the film follows Mike in his new life and his attempts at understanding how he arrived. In the space of a single day Mike Max has lived the American Dream in reverse, and the film is about using circumstances to examine the city's class divide, for, even as his friends and the movie obsessed cop 'Doc' (Loren Dean) search, they invariably look right through him. By re-imagining himself into an underclass, Mike Max becomes invisible, lifted onto that outer shell, able to observe society, unseen. Noticeably, he only becomes visible again by deliberately stepping back into the world: logging onto his email or visiting his own home. And when he does, Paige pulls a gun. How far her husband has travelled.

After his reeling innocent in the magnificent Lost Highway, Bill Pullman again skirts the bounds of commercial cinema as Max. And again it's a strange, almost blank performance that relies as much on him re-acting as acting. His is the role of passive observer, peering out from beneath a baseball cap or watching his old movie-set unfold through a studio window. And again, he's very good.

And so too, surprisingly, is McDowell. Never the brightest torch in the box, she plays a better unsympathetic bitch rather than goof-ball and shows that when she stretches (Altman's Short Cuts, Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape) she really is capable of making a half-decent fist of it.

The film also boasts strong showings from Euro-veteran Udo Kier as a film director, K. Todd Freeman's black rapper, Traci Lind as a stuntwoman turned actress, and the excitable Pruitt Taylor-Vince's unfortunate hitman. Dean makes for an impressive and sympathetic player, and it's oddly reassuring to see Hammett's Frederic Forrest back on hand to cameo as a cop.

But that's far from all. Running in parallel with this first journey is a second that finds computer scientist Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne) working for a secret Government agency, sitting atop a hill above the city, watching its citizens through an elaborate web of surveillance cameras. His boss is Murder One's sinister and hair-free Daniel Benzali, who also apparently hires a female survivor of the South American death squads to spy on his charge. The network, Benzali explains, is about cutting crime and restoring order. And it's only when Ray uses it to watch Mike Max's abduction that he begins to question the price that order demands.

Again the film emphasises its core theme of watching. Like Max, Ray is an observer, a man lifted out of the loop and given a god's eye. The film is, in a sense, about images, about their recording and their decoding. First we have Mike Max's new movie, Seeds of Violence, being constructed in the studio, and now hundreds of grainy black and white images of 'real' life flickering across Ray's screens. Both men are directing, living through a camera.

Underlining the fact, Wenders knowingly casts his one time mentor, the late Sam Fuller as Ray's dying father - a man who rejects his son's technology in favour of a manual typewriter. Fuller's few appearances are loose but punchy - he's improvising through a disabling stroke - and his final scene is truly heartbreaking.

And as befits a picture about images, its own are exceptional. The number of films that make contemporary Los Angeles attractive - Mann's Heat, Altman's The Long Goodbye - are rare indeed. Here cinematographer Pascal Rabaud busies himself framing the place in terms of both the surrounding hills (Ray's 'observatory' is the Griffith, made famous by Wenders' late friend Nicholas Ray in Rebel Without A Cause, of course) and the ocean (a dazzling final shot high above the Santa Monica pier). For Wenders, Los Angeles is "all taking place slightly in the future." It is telling too that Seeds of Violence, whatever its exploitation roots, seeks to bring three-dimensions to no less than Edward Hopper with a real-life staging of the controlled violence in his celebrated Nighthawks. Yet more images filtered and re-imagined.

This is Wenders first time back in the US since his masterpiece, the limpid and elegiac Paris, Texas, fourteen years ago, and again he looks to Ry Cooder to musically interpret his images. The results lay not a million miles off, but ably complement - even define - much of what we see. And of course many a famous friend (Tom Waits, Michael Stipe, U2) is on hand for a song or two.

Some accuse the film of Wendering its merry way through two hours, asking time and again its questions ("Define violence...you're making a movie about it, shouldn't you know what it is?") without furnishing answers. Likewise they cite Wenders' call for violent American pictures to be temporarily excluded from Europe as some kind of madness on its director's part.

But he has never been a film-maker of resolutions. Even his best work - Alice in The Cities, The American Friend, Wings of Desire, Paris Texas - never provided bite-size solutions. And he was hardly serious in suggesting a ban: all he was about was asking us to question what exactly it is we are doing. Violence has its place, he was saying, but as substance and not mere punctuation.

The End of Violence is a languid, meditative picture, part of the unfashionable cinema of ideas that belongs now to a time before (post-)irony. One could accuse it of didacticism if, by the close, you had a firm grip on Wenders' thesis, but the suspicion remains that he and Klein actually have no tract to push. His film asks that you confront violence and not play with it. (One suspects that he would look to what Ben Elton did with the ostensibly similar, but quite execrable, Popcorn and shudder.) And like Cronenberg's picture, it's a serious, playful, engrossing work, beautifully made and convincingly played. Plaudits await the first enterprising soul to run them on the same bill.