'Limits of Control' challenges viewers

If you force-fed horse tranquilizers to "The Bourne Identity," you'd end up with something like "Limits of Control."

It's a postured anti-thriller from Jim Jarmusch, king of the deadpan art film. Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankole stars as a courier/spy (the anti-thriller gag would have been funnier with Jason Statham) who's hopping about Spain delivering diamonds and other unspecified things to a series of colorful contacts.

It's a scenario that allows Jarmusch to play around with a hip cast of stars (Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, Bill Murray, Youki Kudoh, Hiam Abbass). This will no doubt help Jarmusch with overseas sales, but it doesn't help the viewer come any closer to figuring out why they should be watching.

Is it the cinematography of the legendary Chris Doyle? He's known for his lustrous colors and compositions, and also his love of scotch, and this movie had me thirsty for the latter.

The film appears to be about art and commerce (surprise, it favors the former), and buffs can pin their eyelids open and wait for references to Godard, Rimbaud, Burroughs, etc. Die-hard Jarmusch fans will argue that his against-the-grain pacing and inscrutability amounts to something like integrity.

Maybe, but it's not very much fun anymore. Jarmusch seems to have lost the playfulness that made early movies like "Stranger than Paradise" seem so fresh.

Here, the straight-faced jokes mostly fall flat - the dozen or so characters Bankole meets all remark, in Spanish, that he doesn't speak Spanish, a running joke that by movie's end (it's an indulgent two hours) has lost the ability to walk. *

Produced by Stacey Sm*th, Gretchen Mcowan; wr*tten and d*rected by J*m Jarmusch; mus*c by Bor*s; d*str*buted by Focuse Features.