In Theaters

BLOW. Directed by Ted Demme. Written by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes, based on the book by Bruce Porter. 119 minutes. R.

After Stephen Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” Ted Demme’s “Blow” comes off like a flamboyant cartoon, another film about the deglamorization of glamorous people living it up in the glamorous world of drugs.

Based on real-life drug smuggler George Jung (Johnny Depp), a boring dope from Massachusetts who ruled the cocaine market in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s (he’s now serving time in prison), “Blow” is ultimately more about charisma than it is about truth, more about Depp’s smooth strut and tousled hair than it is about George Jung’s fatal flaws – his stupidity, desperation, ego and small-town greed.

The film’s screenwriters, David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes, know enough to be tantalized by Jung’s flaws, but since Demme (“Beautiful Girls”), nephew of director Jonathan Demme, is still in search of a personal style, his film ultimately becomes less about its characters and more about mimicry – specifically, the mimicry of Martin Scorcese’s “Goodfellas” and “Casino.”

But the problem with “Blow” goes deeper than mimicry; what truly kills it is its sluggish pace, its struggle for an epic tone and Demme’s inability to make us take any of the action and the characters seriously.

His film is supposed to be about the ramifications of peddling illegal substances and the ugliness of substance abuse, but since it’s completely lacking in substance itself, it never makes a connection with the audience. Indeed, it’s more content to just blow along in a never-ending stream of drug movie cliches.

With Penelope Cruz doing her best Sharon Stone as Jung’s gorgeous shrew of a wife, Mirtha; Jordi Molla perfectly sleazy as Jung’s duplicitous Colombian partner, Diego; Paul Reubens fine as a gay drug-dealing stylist; and Ray Liotta and Rachel Griffiths entirely unconvincing in their roles as Jung’s parents, “Blow” is all broad strokes and gloss, a film that asks us to feel sympathy for a man who made hundreds of millions of dollars off the destruction of others and the poisoning of inner cities.

For audiences to make that leap, it was Demme’s job to paint George as a victim of something – his upbringing, the world, his cocky ignorance. But Demme doesn’t. Indeed, by the end of the film, Jung remains a curious enigma, a man who may have left his mark on the world, but who leaves no lasting impression here.

Grade: D+

On Video and DVD

MEN OF HONOR. Directed by George Tillman Jr. Written by Scott Marshall Smith. 128 minutes. R.

At the core of George Tillman Jr.’s “Men of Honor” is the moving, true story of a black man overcoming racism in the recently desegregated U.S. Navy of 1948.

If this were the gritty, harder-hitting Hollywood of the early 1970s, a time when directors and writers didn’t feel today’s enormous pressures to make a killing at the box office that alone would have given audiences reason to attend. But now, in the less truthful, whitewashed, feel-good climate of the new millennium, in which movies about racism have become soaked in the earning power of sentimentality, it should only raise a yellow flag of caution.

“Men of Honor” is exactly the type of story today’s Hollywood loves to get its hands around and strangle with formula – not to mention with a score that tells us exactly how to feel during pivotal moments of the film. Indeed, composer Mark Isham’s soaring strings and blaring trumpets present a drippy guidebook of emotions that instructs audiences when to weep, when to get angry, when to be joyous, when to be outraged.

It’s a sort of slumming for sadness and laughs that isn’t just insulting to audiences, but more to the point, to the life the film is allegedly trying to honor: Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a poor Kentucky sharecropper’s son who became the U.S. Navy’s first African-American master diver.

As the film showcases with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, Brashear’s military life was hardly a bed of medals; when he first arrives at the Bayonne, N.J., diving school, none of the enlisted men will bunk with him, and his diving instructor, the sneering military stereotype Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), reveals himself to be a cruel bigot determined to make certain Brashear fails.

Thus begins Brashear’s fight to prove his worthiness to himself, to the Navy, to his people, and to Sunday – an important story and a noteworthy piece of history that may have actually happened, but which is so watered down with predictability and sap, the film ultimately doesn’t honor Brashear at all.

Grade: C-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com