When Hollywood is dried up on inspiration, the options include to make a generic comedy, biographical adaptation or, the easiest of the options, a book-to-screen adaptation. When it comes to this latter category, films rarely, if ever, get it right, and the same could be said for yet another screen reincarnation of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. And it seems director Oliver Parker and producer Barnaby Thompson are quite fond of Mr Wilde, as this is the pair’s third Wilde adaptation after tackling “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest”. And this Wilde outing is far from being their third time lucky.

Before even stepping into the screening room, this adaptation had all ready stirred my anger by reduced the original title to “Dorian Gray”. This ill-advised reduction, and casting Ben Barnes in the lead role, conjured what I imagined the purpose of this adaptation to be: a substandard revision aimed at the older Twilight and Harry Potter generation, with probably an explosion for good measure. The Portrait of Dorian Gray would be filed under the category of books nigh impossible to adapt for the screen because the book itself is very dense and deals with very difficult ideas and debates. All the complexities and soul of Wilde’s original is all but stripped and watered down in this adaptation that it leaves a bland taste in your mouth.

It is not a doom and gloom, well it is, but the imposing gothic atmosphere of late 19th to the early 20th century London is visually sensual and suffocating. Parker is able to transport the audience back to the hellish smog of the industry revolution, while delighting in the exotic opulence of Gray’s systematic journey into every sin available, but this is the director’s only saving grace. The single and most central event in Wilde’s book is Gray‘s transformation from naïve idealist to morally depraved serial sinner, but it is too abrupt and treated as subordinate plot line. While other key storylines such as Gray’s relationship and eventual rejection of girlfriend Sybil (Rachel Hurd-Wood) is clumsy and isn’t as emotional powerful as it should be. However, Hurd-Wood’s performance is laughable and inane, she reduces the complexity of Sybil’s character to an infuriating nagging girlfriend that it is no surprise that Dorian dumps her. But it is not just Hurd-Wood’s acting that fails to impress, the supporting case – Ben Chaplin as Basil Hallward and Rebecca Hall as Emily Wotton, all equally fail to impress. But the film is about the psychological disintegration of Gray’s morality, and as the title character, Ben Barnes is simply not up to the task.

More annoying than his acting is Barnes’s hair, which becomes such a distraction that when watching the prolonged sex scenes, the annoying hair strips Barnes to a state of gender ambiguity and androgyny that I often wondered if I was watching lesbians. Although this film is a directory of British acting talent, present and future, the younger cast members are a colossal failure, while the older cast members, including the delightfully Machiavellian/Faustian and witty interpretation of Lord Henry Wotton by Colin Firth, are only getting better with age, which only goes to prove that there is more to being an actor than having a pretty face. In short, this adaptation fails on nearly every level and reduces a complex multi-layered morality tale to an endless montage of soft porn. The pace of the film is clunky, at times lumbering and often abrupt, and with a duration of nearly two hours, it is too long for a film in which nothing much happens. Oh, and as it turns out, there is an explosion, of some sort.