The Good German is an experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong, like Frankenstein's Monster or Crystal Pepsi. Director Stephen Soderbergh somehow got it into his head to mimic films from the 1940s. Not be inspired by them or pay homage to them, but literally imitate their look and sound and feel. I'm not sure that's a good idea in the first place and then Soderbergh does it in such a self-conscious, grating and ponderous fashion that he creates a film that is, to all intents and purposes, unwatchable.

Jake Geismer (George Clooney) is a war correspondent sent to post-WWII Berlin to cover the Potsdam conference of Truman, Churchill and Stalin. It's a good thing there were other reporters there because Jake completely blows off that historic event to instead get mixed up in a simple yet confusing mystery involving his older German lover Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett) and a rough-edged Army corporal named Tully (Tobey Maguire). Lena desperately wants to get out of Berlin and there are more than a few men willing to help her, some out of love and others for her help in keeping a secret. The unfocused story touches rather ham handedly on collective German guilt over the Holocaust, the first rumblings of the Cold War, the Nazi contribution to the U.S. missile program, life in the rubble of post-War Berlin and Jake Geismer being the biggest wuss in Europe. Seriously, Geismer gets his ass kicked so regularly it's like a running gag, except this movie isn't a comedy.

I wasn't exaggerating when I described The Good German as a bad replica of a 1940s film. It's in black-and-white and Soderbergh uses the same sort of camera work, lighting and stage blocking as that era. He incessantly blasts scenes with the same kind of melodramatic theme music as that time. The movie is littered with stock footage of post-War Germany. Soderbergh even uses 1940's style editing techniques to segue from one scene to another. If that sort of overdrive nostalgia sounds like it might be neat, trust me. It's not.

The problem is that all that effort is painfully purposeless. There's no point at all to any of that cinematic affectation. It doesn't lead anywhere or do anything to enhance the story. There's no metacommentary of any sort at work here. It's just a 21st century filmmaker apparently entertaining himself by regurgitating nearly 60 year old cinema. Imagine seeing modern NBA players trying to replicate on the court the way players shot, dribbled and passed back in the 1940s. It would look artificial and forced and out of sync. That's a great description of The Good German.

Making matters worse, Soderbergh was apparently so caught up in his duplication efforts that he didn't notice that his story meanders and stops making sense at a couple points. He was also oblivious to his three big stars giving atrocious performances. Tobey Maguire's acting ranges from looking like he's reading off cue cards to raging like a meth addict who just smoked some crank. George Clooney is essentially doing a time traveling version of Danny Ocean. And Cate Blanchett seems to be focusing all her energy into speaking two octaves lower than her normal voice.

It was a struggle to make it all the way through this movie. Like being stuck in a time warp where the seconds become minutes and the minutes become hours, the length of this film stretched out longer than the Pleistocene Era. I started to root for everyone to die in an anachronistic atomic explosion, just so this bleepin' piece of crap would end.

One thing this film does prove is the old adage that when it comes to making movies, nobody knows nothing'. Soderbergh and Clooney have teamed up to do some excellent work and then they collaborate on this punishing waste of time and money.

Stay far away from The Good German.

In true noir-ish fashion, much of the intrigue with The Good German is about to whom, and why, the title applies. For a film that has so much devotion to being a 40s recreation or homage, and in spite of another mesmerising performance from the very talented Cate Blanchett, it is also a mystery as to why it is not more of a runaway success.

Employing the grainy black-and-white look of Good Night and Good Luck, only more so, The Good German is a formal exercise in original 40s technique. It uses as its subject 1945 Berlin and the nightmare scenarios of post-war safety. Blanchett plays Lena Brandt, a Jewish German, who attributes her amazing survival to being the ex-wife of an SS man. (She claims he is dead, by the way). Her boyfriend is the violent and abusive Patrick Tully, engagingly played by Tobey Maguire. But haunting her life is also good-guy George Clooney, in the shape of US Captain Jake Geismer. They go back a long way. In more than one sense, to put it delicately. He is disturbed to see her turning tricks as much as he is to see her hanging out with a low-life like Tully.

Lena wants to get out of Berlin, but that is easier said than done. Our film is awash with intrigues as everyone individually tries to help her, but everyone also schemes against each other. Who is a war criminal and who is just an ordinary German? Understandably, no-one wants to be caught with their pants down, and everybody is in Lena's.

Lena herself plays her cards very close to her chest. She only reveals her hand towards the end. As she takes over centre-stage, her story provides some tension and emotional ballast to a plot that is otherwise a bit lifeless. Disappointingly, the usually capable Clooney is the weak link in the acting. His usually charismatically chirpy, cheeky style seems anachronistic and makes him look both typecast and mis-cast. The part could have been written for Humphrey Bogart. There and many thematic and visual references to Casablanca. But Clooney's lack of gravitas highlights the film's stylistic weakness. The Good German is ponderous without conveying a seriousness of the subject matter and so ends up just seeming self-important.

Beautiful noir-ish chiaroscuro lighting is a delicious hearkening back to more substantial classics of old. But, with the exception of Lena, the characters lack the moral ambiguity that was so characteristic of such films. Jake mentions, "the good old days - when you could tell who was the bad guy by who was shooting at you." But, although the line could have come out of the mouth of Bogart, it refers to a period and style of film-making that is a world away from what this tries to be.

Lena (Cate Blanchett) is a mystery, and the film is worth seeing for this magnificent, towering performance, that is also a study in emotional complexity. Long-suffering, she oozes oceans of repressed emotion in a way to make Ingrid Bergman proud. Although more complex than female protagonists of 40s movies, she is still the most successful part of the whole homage.

The story does have a little more subtlety than one might have expected, but I find it hard to imagine vast audiences wading through it joyfully until the pace eventually picks up enough to warrant serious interest. It's good to see the usually very capable Steven Soderbergh directing serious cinema again (instead of his Ocean's Eleven romps) but this over-ambitious project doesn't quite cut it. See it if you're a fan of Blanchett, or if you enjoy seeing Clooney getting beaten up.

Soderbergh is a director with a decent amount of guts but not a lot of talent. Here he attempts to make a classic Hollywood film, reminiscent of The Third Man and Casablanca, by mimicking, or at least trying to mimic, the classical style of cinematography, by scratching the negative, having the dialogue recorded on mono (I think),and having the actors deliver performances along the lines of the studio days. The gimmick honestly doesn't work all that well. Lovers of classic films will notice how different the film-making is from that of the '40s. How hazy the cinematography is compared to Casablanca or The Third Man (it looks like you're watching a movie on a black and white television). Or how much more swearing and sexual content there is in the film. Yes, the gimmick is a weak one and somewhat detrimental to the rest of the film. Otherwise, it's a pretty good mystery. Not a great one. The pacing lags in the middle, and the mystery only starts to make sense right near the end, when much of the audience has stopped caring. The film's strongest asset is Cate Blanchett, who channels Marlene Dietrich. She is easily one of today's best actresses, and the only cinematographic triumph of the film is the lighting of her face – she's drop-dead beautiful. I'll probably be hung by the nostalgists, but I'd take her – in both her acting skills and beauty – over the lead actresses of Casablanca and The Third Man. George Clooney is decent, but his character is fairly two-dimensional. He's a pretty boring hero. I really liked Tobey Maguire, though. His character was much more interesting, and I wish he could have been in the movie more. I absolutely loved the climactic sequence, but the film continues on for too long after that. Blanchett's big revelation at the end feels rather anticlimactic.