Having spent an hour or more licking a woman’s feet, you ought to at least look her in the eye afterwards. Not Dave Brown. He doesn’t do etiquette, sexual or otherwise. “You can’t cheat on something you never committed to”, he quips. When a bent cop starts in on his rookie partner about how “everything you learnt at the Academy is bullshit”, you figure what kind of movie you’re in for. If only Rampart delivered any of it.

The film takes its name from the real-life scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Police Department in 1999. Murder, assault, drug abuse, and evidence tampering were among the everyday activities considered the purview of some 70 LAPD cops. Dave Brown is a fictional escapee of that era, still patrolling the streets while others rot in jail. His immunity to all oversight is remarkable. Despite footage of his having assaulted a passer-by in broad daylight, his superiors let him loose on two robbery suspects, who later show up dead. Such freedom – granted in the shadow of the larger scandal and the public’s growing disillusionment – is bewildering and utterly implausible, even for the LAPD.

Brown is plagued by rumours he once killed a sex offender. A potential court case looms large, though no one seems very concerned; fellow officers jokingly baptise him ‘Date Rape’. Seemingly desperate to live up to such a billing, he drags the moniker through a series of lurid encounters, each more desperate than the last. One is a lawyer, who doesn’t work in real estate. He isn’t looking for financing, and takes her home. You wonder what might come of the prosecution sleeping with the accused. In all matters Rampart, the answer is nothing. No one he meets adds to his condition. Not one thinks to alter his course.

The film ponders on until even it grows tired of its solitary trick. Brown is going nowhere. In offering him neither redemption nor destruction, the film settles merely for disinterest. Woody Harrelson spends every scene adjusting his aviators, smoking coolly atop white picket fences. Playing bad cop may lead to the kind of critical acclaim that once alluded his Surfer Dude, but as an omnipresent lead he is surrounded by vacancy. Neither acquaintance, informant nor adversary explain their motivations, if indeed they have any to speak of. Everyone is exactly as they seem, and nothing more. Sigourney Weaver and Steve Buscemi make their appearances, alongside an unrecognisable Ben Foster, and yet you’d struggle to recall their significance not 5 minutes later.

Given a more interesting plot, burdened perhaps with development or emotional shifts, such thin characterisation might have been forgivable. This is not that plot. Trapped at the helm of a dreary slow walk to oblivion, director Oren Moverman experiments with a handheld camera work, hoping to jar the viewer from the deep slumber they’ll have done well to resist. Even a strange, hazy trawl through a seedy sex club fails to elicit much interest. Harrelson remains stubbornly effective throughout, with a psychopathic calm that surely deserved richer storytelling. When his own daughter admonishes him (“You’re a dinosaur. You’re a classic racist, a bigot, a sexist, a womaniser, a chauvinist, a misanthropic homophobe”), two things come to mind. One, that the description makes him sound considerably more interesting than he really is, and two: what such a film might have looked like.

Any number of apologies are made to loved ones in a coma: anniversaries forgotten, holidays put-off. Not so much is said in return. When you’re in a coma, no one expects you to apologise for anything, even when you ought to. I suppose that’s the upside.

Alexander Payne is a better producer than he is screenwriter, but no body of work that counts Election and About Schmidt amongst its number can be dismissed as trivial. Nonetheless, The Descendants is Payne at his most tired. The film hinges on the performance of a charismatic lead at his most subdued, and what it lacks in energy, it fails to make up for in memorable catastrophe. Step away from the usual award season hysteria, and one thing is clear: no one will remember this film in a year’s time. If it somehow stumbles its way to an Academy Award next month, then it will have done at the conclusion of an incredibly mediocre year in cinema.

Except, it has been anything but.

What we have is a case of mismatched expectations. In different circumstances, The Descendants might have been briefly diverting, and maybe it still is. Considerably more than that was expected of such a cast. George Clooney stars as Matt King, a family lawyer from Honolulu. Together with his extended family, he is the trustee of an estate spanning some 25,000 acres of idyllic Hawaiian coastline. As originally conceived, such a paradise was to be passed down in perpetuity, until a change in law forced its sale. No surprise, then, when a previously-horizontal King is suddenly taken to thunderous outbursts toward the tropical preserve he calls home. To wit: “Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself.”

It isn’t clear what came first, the sadness or his wife’s speedboat accident. What is clear are that such feelings come second to those of his troubled children. The youngest, Scottie, spreads rumours about a fellow classmate having returned from summer vacation with a thicket of pubic hair. 17-year-old Alex once nursed a sizable drinking habit, only nowadays she restricts herself to mere adolescent detachment. Separately or together, their troubles exist only as long as the introductory dialogue lasts, never to appear again. Their comatose mother has a more appreciable concern: not only was she having an affair at the time of her accident, she was preparing to file for divorce. See, those are the type of bedside conversations that could use a reply or two.

Matt uproots to the nearby island of Kaua to find the other man in his wife’s life, while juggling a $500 million land deal and blundering attempts to reconcile with his daughters. The overriding tone is of Sideways, the morning after. Payne once again mines his pet themes of adultery and discontent, only to emerge with little of character. If anything, he simply appears bored. It’s a feeling that runs throughout the picture, in nearly every miserable frame. Everything is dialled down. After two hours of scant consequence, even Hawaii starts to look drab.

A dull movie is little better than a bad one, and oftentimes considerably worse: at least the turkeys are memorable. What of The Descendants will inspire conversation? Not the tired plot or barely-there characters, certainly. Not even an inevitable confrontation between husband and Pool Boy can lay claim to any kind of urgency. Such was my growing disinterest with the material that my notes quickly devolved into a series of free-association hieroglyphs. From them, I can surmise this: Clooney is quite good as the repressed husband; he waddles furiously and well. Shailene Woodley is quite good as his eldest daughter. Everyone is quite good in this quite good film, and how depressing is that? The Descendants is the kind of pleasant movie that award ceremonies fall over themselves to crown, even as it’s being forgotten.