Reviewed - Wicker Park: Smugly aware that the great majority of US cinemagoers will not pay to see a subtitled film - The Passion of the Christ being a very rare exception - Hollywood persists in recycling European movies with US settings. More often than not, the virtues of the original are lost in translation, writes Michael Dwyer.

Wicker Park is a textbook example of how to get it wrong. It is based on writer-director Gilles Mimouni's auspicious 1996 feature film debut, L'Appartement, a clever jigsaw of a movie that paid explicit homage to several Hitchcock classics and played adroitly with time-shifting and different perspectives. Mimouni is credited as an executive producer on the remake, but it's unlikely that he contributed anything to it beyond selling the rights to his screenplay.

The new version, scripted by Brandon Boyce, who also adapted Stephen King's Apt Pupil, is reasonably faithful to the intricate plotting of Mimouni's screenplay, but only in the sense that it retains most of its narrative nuts and bolts. It jettisons the sophistication, atmosphere and tension of the original, offering mere blandness instead. And in the eight years since Mimouni's film, technology has overtaken and undermined its premise, with the widespread availability and use of mobile phones.

Bookended by ballads from The Stereophonics and Coldplay, Wicker Park transposes the original story from Paris to Chicago, - none too convincingly, as it was shot primarily in Montreal. Even less persuasive is the vacant central performance from Josh Hartnett as a rising advertising executive engaged to marry his employer's sister.

In a restaurant before he is due to travel to Shanghai on business, Hartnett's Matthew is distracted by the possibility of rediscovering the lost love of his life, and his routine and schedule are thrown into upheaval. A feeble nod to L'Appartement involves naming the restaurant after Monica Bellucci, the leading actress of the original.

McGuigan, who showed so much promise as a director with Gangster No 1, subjects the intriguing scenario of his latest film to a flat, insipid treatment that makes it difficult to care a whit for the protagonists and their fates. It's not at all surprising that the movie has been lying on a shelf for so long that its leading actresses, Rose Byrne and Diane Kruger, made it before both of them embarked on the epic shoot for Troy, which was released four months ago.