Directed by Francis Lawrence. Starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz, Hal Holbrook, Ken Foree 12A cert, gen release, 120 min

THE OPENING SCENES of this tepid drama leave no doubt that the film-makers intend to bypass the intellect and carve their way directly towards the tear-ducts. We find a slightly delicate old man (the untouchable Hal Halbrook) lurking outside a circus. Offered a drink, he falls into a reverie about his own experiences in a travelling show during the Great Depression. Oh, no. It's the same shameless framing device that helped make Titanicsimultaneously nauseating and lachrymose.

Sure enough, we drift back through time and find Holbrook transformed into the unconvincing form of Robert Pattinson. The protagonist, Jacob Jankowski, is a veterinary student who, on the day of his finals, learns that his parents have died in a car crash. Rendered penniless, he takes to the road.

Almost immediately, Jacob happens upon a travelling circus. After lying about his qualifications, Jacob finds himself employed as the enterprise’s vet. The job becomes more taxing when, desperate to reverse a slide into bankruptcy, August (Christoph Waltz), the circus’s malevolent owner, buys an elephant and instructs Jacob to make the beast dance. While dallying with his bucket and poky stick, Jacob becomes dangerously close to Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), August’s wife.

Working from a bestseller by Sara Gruen, I Am Legenddirector Francis Lawrence makes something compromised and dull of the material. Water for Elephantsis too sunny and clean to convey any true sense of the governing national degradation or of the everyday dinginess that characterises circus life. Yet the environment is too drab to accommodate any hint of the fantastic. (One is reminded neither of Tod Browning's Freaksnor of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus.)

More damagingly, the love triangle is dangerously underpowered. Reprising his characterisation from Inglourious Basterds, Waltz has fun playing Rudolph Hess the circus ringmaster. But Witherspoon rarely gets a line worth saying, and Pattinson, still waiting to escape the legion of the undead, only uses two modes of expression throughout: an apparent inclination to vomit when sad and a scrunching up of the eyes when happy. His time will come.