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Verdict: A visually compelling epic that can't decide if its heroine is saint or psycho.

Details: Starring Milla Jovovich, Faye Dunaway and Dustin Hoffman. Directed by Luc Besson. Rated R for strong graphic battles, a rape and some language. 2 hours, 20 minutes.

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Review: Nearly 600 years after she lived her fleeting but ferocious life and died a scorching martyr's death, Joan of Arc remains an enigma, catnip to filmmakers. Luc Besson's "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc" recasts the warrior maiden as an action hero embedded in a flashy (but very 1990s) epic. She's the kind of fighter who can yank out an arrow buried deep in her breast, then take a nice nap.

When Joan is leading her troops to victory against the British, the movie has considerable visual oomph. But when the swordplay slows and the characters talk, you realize that it doesn't know what to make of this Maid of Orleans, or her story's mixture of spiritual fervor, military maneuvers and political cunning.

Besson's script, written with Andrew Birkin, can't decide whether Joan (here called Jeanne, her French name) was a mystic hard-wired to God, a neurotic teenager or a powermonger out for her own glory. So we get a little of each. "Messenger" delivers a confusing mytho-theology that hedges its bets between religious vision and movie-of-the-week psychological motivation. The movie invents the brutal rape and murder of Jeanne's beloved sister by a soldier in order to underscore the girl's hatred of the British. With typical lack of subtlety, young Jeanne screams, "I just want the British to burn in hell forever!"

But we meet young Jeanne (Jane Valentine) before this, romping through the countryside, high on her love of God. Lying dazed in a field, she envisions blazing lights and figures in the sky, and a silver sword appears like a seeming miracle in the grass beside her.

We skip ahead to Jeanne's famous confrontation with the dauphin, Charles VII (John Malkovich) at Chinon. Picking him out in his layman disguise in a crowded room, Jeanne (now played by Besson's ex, Milla Jovovich) demands an army to repel the British invaders and vows to see him crowned. The best of the movie follows: scenes of battle and surprise reversals of fortune as Jeanne proves herself up to her hype. We get your usual she's-just-a-girl tensions, as she seizes command from the dauphin's half brother Dunois (Tcheky Karyo), whose slow-burn bursts of exasperation give the film some of its comic relief.

The battle scenes revel in hacked-off heads and limbs, gougings of all kinds, baths of boiling oil. But there's a point to the carnage: the puzzle of a supposedly loving God who would instruct Jeanne to unleash such bloodshed in his name.

The movie returns often to this contradiction, trying to reconcile the many faces of Jeanne. On the one hand, it suggests that she was just an ignorant channeling her energies and anger into a holy war that just happened to succeed. But the movie also lets us see her psychedelic trances (which recall the peyote trips from "Altered States"), letting us believe, if we like, that she was truly divinely inspired. While the filmmakers might claim that their choices are an expression of Jeanne's historical ambiguity, their refusal to take a point of view and stick to it ultimately feels cowardly.

"Messenger" slows to a fatal crawl in its last hour, when Jeanne is betrayed, sold to the English and tried for heresy. These scenes draw on the actual trial records, which let us get a sense of the canny, disarming mind of the real Jeanne. But these bits are interspersed with mystical appearances by a black-hooded Dustin Hoffman, playing a character called the Conscience, who questions Jeanne's motives in her jail cell. Vanishing into thin air, or sliding into frame for scruffy close-ups, Hoffman seems like a refugee from a Bergman film; he verges on becoming a pretentious joke.

Surprisingly, the movie is full of intentional humor, most of it provided by the royals. Malkovich fusses about the inadequacies of his coronation outfit like a spoiled brat, and Faye Dunaway, as his scheming mother-in-law, turns in a wry, grande dame performance. (The cast of British, French and American actors sometimes gives the film an uneasy Tower of Babel mixture of accents.)

While the lanky, short-cropped Jovovich gives "Boys Don't Cry" star Hilary Swank some competition in the androgyny department, her acting chops aren't up to the job. Especially in a film that asks for a rich, ambiguous interpretation of its elusive heroine, the model-turned-actress gives a feverish but surface performance. When she shrieks, "I am the drum on which God is beating out his message," she seems more like a candidate for Prozac than a national heroine. Like the movie she's in, her Jeanne is, pardon the term, half-baked.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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