The idea that a Hollywood filmmaker who specializes in violent action pictures might gain access to a top-secret government surveillance scheme and thus put his life in danger has possibilities for a thoughtful thriller (and, in the wake of Sept. 11 and the formation of the Office of Homeland Security, timeliness). But Wim Wenders' 1997 film suffers badly from miscasting and a snoozy pace that reflects his aesthetic but only exposes the film's flaws. Bill Pullman doesn't bring any sense of crass conviction to Mike Max's personality, so that Max's conversion after an assassination attempt into a reclusive, reflective kind of guy isn't very convincing. Andie MacDowell has problems with her character, as well, in part because Paige is ill-defined, one moment leaving her self-absorbed husband to do relief work in Central America, the next moment hopping into bed with Six (K. Todd Freeman), a black poet who comes off as more of a jive artist than a soul man. Gabriel Byrne is fairly effective as the mopey Ray Bering, an astronomer sucked into the surveillance scheme, but his naïveté concerning a cleaning woman (Marisol Padilla Sanchez) who works at the Griffith Observatory is hard to take. The film's real pleasures lie in its fringe players: Samuel Fuller as Bering's addled father; Daniel Benzali as the government heavy; Traci Lind as a stunt woman hoping for a break; Udo Kier as a European expatriate weary of the Hollywood runaround; and Henry Silva, bringing some dignity to the clichéd role of the Mexican patriarch of a family of gardeners. The musical score, particularly the work of the estimable Ry Cooder, promises more menace and foreboding than the visuals and dialogue can deliver.