We're sorry to be irreverent about a heart-on-sleeve, well-meaning movie, but Keanu Reeves is at his most miscast and ridiculous as a youthful Prince Siddhartha, who turns into Buddha. He wears more makeup than Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, after whom both his eye-liner and performance seem to have been patterned. Keanu's half of the story can't really be called a success, but even less so can the present-day tale about the Tibetan monks' search for a child reincarnation of the 'Enlightened One', who turns out to be the 10-year-old son (Alex Wiesendanger) of the couple played by Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda. Bernardo Bertolucci's earnest film is painstaking, glossy and amusing, but it isn't at all the distinguished, spiritually-uplifting mystical-religious epic to inspire today's youth that he obviously intended.

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