Disappointing Troy, Wolfgang Peterson’s telling of The Iliad, is a film with a confident sense of scale, a supremely sensual cast, a classic story of love and war, a great movie star at its center and an absolutely bloodless and disengaged script that blows every chance imaginable to invite empathy. Lacking political or sexual complexity, the film revels in beefcake at the expense of feeling, scale at the expense of intimacy, as if they were mutually exclusive.

Set in ancient Greece, the Cliff’s Notes screenplay begins as Troy’s Prince Paris (Orlando Bloom) makes off with Sparta’s Queen Helen (Diane Krueger), unleashing hell. Scorned King Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), his brother King Agamemnon (an excellent Brian Cox) of the Mycenaeans, and the powerful renegade "soldier without a king,"

Achilles (Brad Pitt), storm the walled city of Troy, in search of vengeance.

Troy is bogged down with tedious pageantry and bloated CGI effects that play like outtakes from The Lord of the Rings. It’s time to call a moratorium on computer-generated, super-scale battle scenes that are virtually unable to be differentiated from each other. They have now become such a part of film vernacular that they’ve lost their ability to thrill. Ditto the expansive thousand ships en route to Troy, which are convincing enough, appropriately huge in scale and… absolutely boring.

In fact, Troy is so tepid and offers so little narrative focus that by midpoint, we’re left with no one to root for but a brooding anti-hero and a pair of shallow, pallid lovers. You can’t believe a thousand ships were launched, let alone a civilization decimated, by what is presented here as a most casual affair rather than the hell of war unleashed by the bonds of true love. The presence of the Greek gods, who figure so prominently in the original source, has also been curiously removed as if to be soft-pedaled to an audience looking for glamorous barbarism and little more.

What Peterson is obsessed with here is the buff physique of Pitt, who saunters around undressed and semi-nude through much of the film, as does an emasculated Orlando Bloom and an effectively macho Eric Bana as Troy’s Prince Hector, who gives the film a charge each time he’s onscreen. The film seems so intent to gaze on their glorious glutes that it all but disposes of the female characters with one notable exception.

Pitt, the most appealing of movie stars for his deliberately low-key performance style, may be part of the problem here. While Peterson has created a film that is maximus everything, and goes way over the top with his gaudy pageantry and often brutally effective mano-a-mano combat, Pitt, who certainly matches Bana physically in the "bigger is better" department, delivers a mannered, minimalist performance that mistakes monotone for stoic heroism.

It’s too bad because Pitt, as likable as they come, does have a few tender moments (including a directly lifted grieving moment that incorporates the same physical gestures he leaned on in Edward Zwicks’ superior Legends of the Fall). His pumped up visage is impressive. Less so is the obviously artificial hair color, which seems to range from honey blond to a golden orange sometimes in the same scene.

The women are laughably vapid, starting with Helen (unremarkable German model Diane Krueger), who is such an empty vessel and absent from most of the film that one wonders why the whole conflict started in the first place. Faring worse might be the usually excellent Saffron Burrows, as Hector’s beloved wife, increasingly difficult to tolerate in scene after thankless scene of crying jags. The film’s best performance comes from the bright Rose Byrne, as King Priam’s niece Briseis, who falls in love with Achilles and manages to express the pointlessness of war’s spoils on both sides.

Troy is an unmistakably plodding affair without any real political insight into the complexity of war. However, there are a few resonant political jabs: "War is young men dying, old men talking," and "History remembers kings, not soldiers."

Peterson does stage some interesting combat scenes, and a great sequence involving a sneak attack with fireballs. A couple of good supporting performances are evident, and a late scene of power with incomparable Peter O’Toole as Troy’s King Priam, cutting to the heart of the film that’s been missing up to that point.

Troy is a phony epic that gets the large backdrop right but fails to tell an intimate story on a comparable scale. We are simply given no reason to care about anything on the screen other than the beauty of the male stars. The late destruction of Troy at the hands of the Trojan horse is unspectacular and, like much of the film, is competent but wan.

Thirty minutes before the film ended, a fellow critic leaned over to me and said, "I can’t take another minute of this."

I second that.