As someone who's never read Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' landmark "Watchmen" comics, I found myself approaching Zack ("300") Snyder's cinematic adaptation with a strangely liberating sense of open-minded naiveté. There would be no nostalgia for the original work to get in my way, no foreknowledge of the story to color my expectations... for me it would just be a movie, one that I could judge entirely on its own merits.

Not that I didn't have my own biases. Personally I hated "300", and I remain ambivalent about Synder's revered status in Hollywood as a "visionary" director. Still, I went into "Watchmen" prepared to take whatever it could dish out. Nearly three hours later, I stumbled out of the theater, feeling a strange combination of sheer exhaustion, satisfaction, and disappointment.

Exhaustion, because "Watchmen" is a punishing movie, in terms of both its visceral impact and its bloated running time. Satisfaction, because at least in some ways the flick did deliver the kind of slick, provocative "superheroes for grownups" entertainment I'd been hoping for. And disappointment, because for all its bombastic visual splendor and stabs at adult relevance, "Watchmen" ultimately feels empty and nihilistic, a movie that dazzles even as it keeps you at a chilly arms-length distance.

This emotional detachment seems to have become Snyder's trademark, along with elaborate action choreography and jaw-dropping eyefulls of cinematic razzle-dazzle (though, to be fair, he's smarter about using special effects than, say, Michael Bay... at least Snyder keeps focused on the story). There's plenty of character-based melodrama to go with the copious FX, but somehow the film never quite brings any of it to life, never finds much of a reason to care what happens to its tormented cast of "real" superheroes. The script bears much of the blame for this, of course - tonally it careens between legitimately insightful and pretentious (or just sledgehammer blunt: "I knew I should have gotten that abortion!" screams an angry mother by way of illustrating one key character's unhappy childhood).

I honestly don't know how much fidelity "Watchmen" has to its source comics, but what I do know is that as a film it isn't nearly as thematically deep as it pretends to be. For a storyline largely concerned with the ambiguity of vigilante justice, there's very little consequence to the copious bloodletting and bone-crunching violence dished out by the only marginally sympathetic heroes, and little reason to care that there isn't, either. It's a movie about gray areas that doesn't seem to actually have many. As a result, the world doesn't come alive so much as it's simply shown to you, in all its visually impressive glory, while the characters and their attendant dramas don't truly engage so much as they're simply moved around like brightly-colored, overly-verbose pawns in an emotionally manipulative game of chess.

This is not to suggest that "Watchmen" doesn't have its plusses. As I said, the film may be hollow at its core, but like a Fabergé egg, it's certainly stunning to look at, and there are moments that go beyond mere visual splendor to achieve a kind of wonderment. The performances are uniformly solid, and Snyder deserves credit for casting based on ability versus bankability (underrated character actor Matt Frewer makes a welcome appearance, as does little person Danny Woodburn... there's not an A-list star in sight). It's an undeniably ambitious story, and if it doesn't quite hit its mark, it still deserves a lot of credit for going to some legitimately dark and challenging places. Since it does at least partially deliver what it promises, I'm not prepared to label "Watchmen" a failure, but neither can I honestly call it a success. It is what it is: a flawed, fascinating, colorful, cruel spectacle that both underwhelms and overwhelms in equal measures.