All the elements are in place--a steamy setting on a Louisiana bayou, intriguing bad guys hell-bent on malfeasance, a world-weary hero trying to stay off the bottle--and yet, it never rises above the level of mediocre. This is mostly due to a rambling, sentimental plot that never even tries to be clever--or, at the very least, cohesive. Even the title, Heaven's Prisoners, suffers from the same lack of center as the movie as a whole. Why is it entitled Heaven's Prisoners? Can one in fact be incarcerated in heaven? Is this, like, a metaphor for the struggles of the characters or something?

There's nothing in Heaven's Prisoners that hints to the origin of the title (except for a couple of extraneous scenes in a church), but I have a theory: It's called Heaven's Prisoners because it sounds good without really meaning anything. (The guy ahead of me in the line couldn't pick out the title and just asked for a ticket to "the one with Teri Hatcher in it.")

The movie is set in bayou country and in New Orleans because these are places that look nice on film. It stars Alec Baldwin and three hot babes because hey, you can't beat the sight of a Baldwin flanked by babes. In short: all style, negligible content.

This would be more palatable if the content weren't so long-winded and didn't take itself so seriously.

Barb Wire, by counterpoint, is another empty exercise in style and exhibitionism that at least has the grace never to promise anything more. Heaven's Prisoners, on the other hand, is the supposedly deep story of a guy called Dave Robicheaux (Baldwin), an ex-cop who's quit the New Orleans police force and gone on the wagon with a vengeance. He lives in the Louisiana backcountry with his endlessly supportive wife (Kelly Lynch). We know Robicheaux is an ex-cop because every single character he encounters in the first hour of this movie exclaims, "You look like a cop," or, "You're not a cop anymore," or, "Aren't you that cop I used to know?" Hmmm, maybe the man used to be a policeman.

Robicheaux gets sucked back into cop-like action when he and his wife accidentally become entangled with unsavory drug dealers and an adorable orphaned child from Central America. The bad guys are led by the imposing Eric Roberts, in Bo Derek corn rows, along with his bad-seed wife Teri Hatcher. It's impossible to tell which of the two is more intrinsically evil, and more importantly, it's hard to care. The plot is simply too poorly thought-out for the scheming and double-crossings of the villains to be intriguing. Half the fun of thrillers is trying to figure out who did what to whom--but this movie is so amorphous, it's difficult to even begin to frame questions, much less answers. Information seems to be missing or present in an incomplete form. The big picture is fuzzy. What is clear is that bad guys are after Robicheaux, and he, in turn, is after them. When they encounter one another, they fight. This continues for two-and-a-half hours.

Director Phil Joanou, known for the steamy but elliptical TV miniseries Wild Palms, is no doubt the culprit here. He began as a music video director and his previous work has been predictably long on moodiness and short on story.

And though Heaven's Prisoners lacks a premise, its visual texture is rich and fascinating. The swampland is a lush and evocative backdrop to the action, and half the bad guys seem to have overflowing Voodoo shrines in their apartments. Baldwin, constantly soaked with sweat, travels through a series of broken-down New Orleans streets and bars talking to strippers who can't get up early enough to go to the funerals of their friends. One joint, called The Jungle Room, has a cage full of monkeys behind the bar that the patrons feed peanuts.

The actors, too, are interesting to watch, though none has much to work with. Roberts manages to bring presence and energy to his thinly drawn role, and Baldwin carries a kind of Cary Grant quality--he's big, good-looking and stiff, but he just seems like a movie star. If only he didn't speak with that phony southern accent. The female cast members suffer more at the hands of the clichéd script as each tries to fulfill the same task of trying to look obsessed with Baldwin. And yes, Hatcher appears nude, but only briefly. Then she runs away. Maybe she's off to plot her escape from heaven, in which she's imprisoned, or something.