First things first and, yes, we can confirm that Eyes Wide Shut is adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle. The credits say ‘inspired by’ but that’s disingenuous - apart from co-writers Frederic Raphael and Kubrick updating to contemporary New York, few films in recent memory place quite such an emphasis on the literary. Except, of course, that it takes considerably less time to actually read the original than bravely soldier through Kubrick. This is a very long film that, with little change from three hours, feels like it.

Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and wife Alice (Mrs Cruise, Nicole Kidman) attend a Christmas party thrown by the wealthy Victor Ziegler (Sidney Pollack). Mid-way through the evening Alice flirts drunkenly with a Hungarian roué and Bill is called to administer to a young prostitute, overdosed in Ziegler’s bathroom. Later, Alice confesses a sexual fantasy involving a young naval officer. Horrified, Bill stumbles out into the night and a sexual odyssey through the city and its environs, seeing him almost sleep with a hooker and eventually fetch-up at an up-market orgy cum Black Mass. He is unmasked, threatened and expelled.

Almost is right: Eyes Wide Shut is all foreplay. While we can hardly lay the blame at Stanley’s door for the salacious rumours (and, sadly, on this evidence that wonderful Harvey Keitel story turns out to be completely fictitious), the finished film is coy in a way that leaves one wondering if Last Tango In Paris ever penetrated fortress Kubrick. Sixty seconds were digitally tweaked in the States to avoid an NC-17, but the orgy, in all its unmasked liberal-European glory is pretty standard post-watershed TV fare.

Which does rather point up a - the? - fatal flaw in Kubrick’s design: it feels old-fashioned. Arriving with Von Trier’s The Idiots and Catherine Breillat’s Romance, the film offers less than nothing. Indeed, that solemn orgy, with all its attendant ritual, barely keeps its head above Dennis Wheatley. And later, when Ziegler gravely intones to Bill that he doesn’t understand the seriousness of his situation, Kubrick’s audience can only nod. At its - apparently - most serious, Eyes Wide Shut inspires more giggles than shivers. And quite what the most ugly, crashing zoom this side of Jess Franco is doing here is anyone’s guess.

Watching the infamous A Clockwork Orange these days, one is immediately struck by the frankly exploitative use the 70s Kubrick made of his actresses. It’s a film littered with copious and unsettlingly depicted female nudity. And yet here we are twenty-eight years later and nothing much seems to have changed. The full frontal scenes in Eyes Wide Shut are again copious, gratuitous and no less disturbing. Needless to say, they are in no way matched by those involving his male performers: Kidman gets her kit off, Tom keeps his pants on. This film bypasses all advances in sexual politics in the past quarter-century.

However, let us stop. Kubrick, as the obits insisted, was one of the greats. A master story-teller and visual stylist. And assuming, as we must, that he lived in the real world, then one has to conclude that the more bizarre elements of his film are quite deliberate. That the design and the photography purposefully ape 1974. Only the extended takes and whirling StediCam hint that this is a contemporary piece.

Still, think on the title of the novel: Traumnovelle, or Dream Story. Only if we take events to be Bill Harford’s own prosaic, clumsy dream does the film begin to engage with logic. Certainly he seems to be pursued on his journey, but not so much by dangerous zealots as a Christmas tree. Really. Watch as his every step is dogged by decorated firs dressed to echo the first we see. Likewise, the waterfall of fairy lights that cascade down Zeigler’s staircase re-emerge several times during the picture. With such visual signifiers it’s only a minor stretch to place events entirely within Bill Harford’s own head, either as unconscious response to his wife’s admissions or, quite possibly, even encompassing them. Maybe at the beginning and end we actually enter the real world, or maybe the whole is fantasy? Who knows? Certainly a close reading of Schnitzler’s equally ambiguous novel is no help.

What we essentially have then is a priapic It’s A Wonderful Life, in which a Christmas tree - or at least Dr Bill’s mind - leads him on a sexual adventure through the would-be touchstones of his own, meagre erotic imagination. That might explain why it encompasses fantasies of sleeping with two models simultaneously, why he is rescued from screwing the prostitute (who turns out to be HIV+) by a phonecall from his wife, and why the film’s idea of debauchery looks like an off-cut from The Devil Rides Out. It would at least explain the generosity of the screen’s most glamorous street hooker since Julia Roberts. Maybe Dr Bill has a secret stash of video smut that isolates his pornographic imagination in the early 70s. Eyes Wide Shut, then, the unofficial sequel to Risky Business: a further trip through the sexually arrested mind of the American teenager.

But that is by way of explanation, not excuse. Because, sadly, even with this extra layer of intellectual endeavour, Eyes Wide Shut is poor. It takes almost three hours to do what it could so easily have accomplished in half the time. Some scenes, like Kidman and the Hungarian, and especially Cruise and Pollack’s final meeting, don’t feel as if they were ever seen, let alone touched by an editor. The screenplay is pedantic and again beset by this particular director’s complete misunderstanding of comedy: the paedophilia in a theatrical costumier’s is crass, ugly and quite possibly racist. Whatever games we like to play in understanding enliven the experience of having to sit through it. If, say, hack-man Joel Schumacher had delivered this, incredulous audiences would have moved swiftly on. Canada’s Atom Egoyan has been here several times and produced a rack of brilliant works - Exotica, The Adjuster, Speaking Parts - that simply leave Kubrick standing.

So what is good? Well, Kidman is terrific but underused, disappearing for whole swathes of the picture. Her husband, despite rumours to the contrary, is surprisingly okay, if that’s not to damn with faint praise; his work will simply never have the weight he craves. Sidney Pollack, the only other real character, is pretty good. At least two of them will be nominated. And, it might only be a minor thing (in a film like this we cling to what we can find) but Kubrick’s evocation of the city itself is remarkable; the sound design is particularly effective.

But what can one say? Eyes Wide Shut is as baffling as much else of the Kubrick canon. It doesn’t suffer like The Shining or Full Metal Jacket from a great first act and a really lousy second. It does, though, gorge itself on performances that are more adequate than engaging; one suspects Stanley’s celebrated multiple-take technique does not serve performers well. It’s an hermetic work that simply cannot exist outside of itself. We make excuses because it’s Kubrick, but there has to be a point at which a film is left to stand on its own two feet. And that, precisely, is when Eyes Wide Shut falls flat on its bloated face.