This is not a Jan Kounen film. It's not even a Jan Kounen presentation. As the final credits would have it, it's a Jan Kounen Session.

And, crikey, does it feel like one. A two-hour session in the company of a director with an obession with the occult and the inability to know when enough's enough.

Raised by Indians and taught in their ways, French-speaking lieutenant Mike Blueberry (Cassel) is stranded between two cultures.

On the one hand he lays down the law in the frontier town of Palomito, while on the other he's desperate to discover his origins before he was taken in.

His nemesis arrives in the form of Wally Blount (Mike Madsen), a cruel, lone ranger who covets the Indian magic located in the sacred mountains.

Assisted by Runi (Temuera Morrison), the shaman "brother" he was raised with, Blueberry must face Blount as well as his inner demons to gain freedom from the past.

Sergio Leone hinted sublimely - and far more subtly - at the supernatural in his spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood as the mysterioius "man with no name".

Although this aspires to blending the ghostly with the epic Western, it fails - largely because the traditional cowboy strand of the story is a complete mess.

Cassel's brooding intensity is never harnessed while Juliette Lewis is just plain embarrassing as the flakey love interest prone to burst into A Londonderry Air at the drop of a stetson.

Cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata has captured some magnificent shots of the barren wastes of the desert but his forays into shamanic visions play like a cross between a sinister screensaver and the experiments of a nipper with his first Spirotot.

Overblown and overlong, what kicks off as a promising premise dissolves into a daft - rather than dramatic - slog with Eddie Izzard's unlikely Prussian officer the final straw in an incoherent pudding.

It's big... but it's not clever.

Tim Evans