EIGHT MILLIMETER. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Running time: 123 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence, perverse sexuality, strong language).

Let’s face it — there are those who will insist on seeing Joel Schumacher’s “Eight Millimeter” not because of its pseudosubversive plot, but because it stars Nicolas Cage.

Here’s a warning to them: Wear a handsome watch, because that’s precisely what you’ll be looking at during much of this embarrassing film’s two-hour running time.

“Eight Millimeter” is Hollywood’s latest effort to shock audiences with the unthinkable, to expose them to depraved underworlds, to make a buck off sexual perversion. That’s all fine and good if there is genuine shock within the unthinkable, a good story behind the depravity and strong characters woven into the perverse tapestry; “Hardcore” (1979), “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and “Se7en” (1995) are three films that worked for these reasons. “Eight Millimeter” fails to work at all.

The film is the gutless story of Tom Welles (the woefully miscast Cage), a private investigator hired by a wealthy, elderly widow (Myra Carter) to investigate what appears to be a snuff film found in her late husband’s safe. In dull, textbook dialogue, Welles explains that snuff films (pornographic films that end with the violent death of a woman) are basically an urban legend — makeup, special effects, you know. And then he is handed the 8mm tape.

As he watches the tape, Cage throws himself into his weakest acting of his career, cringing so badly, and so unbelievably, a ripple of laughter shot through the crowd at my screening. Is he reacting to his performance in “Face/Off”? “Con Air”? Apparently not. This film, it turns out, is indeed the stuff of snuff. Hired by the widow, Welles is asked to see if the girl in the tape was indeed murdered. It’s a fine premise that could have made for a thrilling film had director Schumacher only known what to do with the dark material.

He doesn’t. In spite of being written by the same screenwriter who penned the unabashedly evil “Se7en,” “Eight Millimeter” never comes close to understanding the horror it’s trying to convey. It can’t — or won’t — give itself over to the dark side it courts so cautiously. Schumacher does offer glimpses into the film’s elusive otherworld — we see the leather hoods, the sharp knives, the fleeting shots of tortured victims — but he is too timid to give his audience the long, extended shots that made “Silence of the Lambs” an unnerving, deeply affecting film.

With the exception of Joaquin Phoenix as Welles’ guide to the underworld, the characters in “Eight Millimeter” seem determined to be uninteresting. They are stick figures up there, never fully developed by the sad-sack, third-rate cast. When the film ends, we know as much about them as when we first sat down, which might be a hidden blessing as these people have the collective personality of a wooden shoe.

Unfortunately, “Eight Millimeter” mirrors its only premise: It isn’t nearly up to snuff. Grade: D-

Video of the week

PI. Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Running time: 85 minutes. Rated R (for language and violent images).

If you’re going to write and direct a thriller that’s strictly by the numbers, it had better be a film like Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi,” an outstanding, intellectual outing into madness, paranoia and the genius that sometimes underlies both.

The film, shot in rough, high-contrast black-and-white on an unheard of $20,000 budget, has the distinction of being that rare original, a film that never plays it safe, either visually, thematically or, in this case, even spiritually.

This mathematical thriller’s focus is on Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette), a disturbed man with a rather peculiar obsession: He believes that through numbers, particularly through the mathematical equation pi, patterns emerge.

So what? So plenty. Cohen believes that understanding these patterns will help to dissolve universal chaos, move humans to a higher plane of understanding in nature and in religion, and, theoretically, help us to predict future events, such as the rise and fall of the stock market, or even the outcome of a baseball game.

Marked by its ambition, its verve and its unrelenting pace, “Pi” gives itself over to the bizarre in ways that “Eight Millimeter” could only dream. Grade: A-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday in the NEWS. Each week on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today,” he reviews current feature films (Tuesdays) and what’s new and worth renting at video stores