John Malkovich makes his directorial debut with The Dancer Upstairs by first-time screenwriter Nicholas Shakespeare (and isn’t that some kind of pressure?). The film follows police officer Agustin Rejas (Javier Bardem, looking rather like Raul Julia circa Addams Family) as he attempts to track the mysterious figure Ezequiel, the head of a violent gang of revolutionaries. Although it is never identified as such in the film (the country is only identified as being in Latin America), the story is largely based on the activities of Sendero Luminoso (better known to us as The Shining Path) and its leader Abimael Guzman, a leftist guerilla group that terrorized Peru in the mid-’80s to early-’90s.

In spite of the rich background they have to draw from, however, Shakespeare and Malkovich never manage to immerse the film in anything that feels like a social-political context. The trappings are there, but essentially this could be a run-of-the-mill thriller set in the U.S., following the one good cop who is surrounded by corruption, with personal troubles of his own, while tracking a ruthless killer. The personal angle is particularly lacking, as Rejas’s wife and friends are broadly drawn pictures of vapidity, so that when Rejas is pulled toward his daughter’s ballet teacher, it seems only because she is deeper than his wife, which is not really much of a feat.

Elements of the social and political upheaval that seem also constant in South America (as evidenced by recent events in places like Venezuela) are presented here—corrupt officials, martial law, secret trials, assassinations—but not in any meaningful way. The real day-to-day impact of these conditions are shown, at best, fleetingly, and with little emotional resonance. The thriller angle, which is the real meat of the movie, is passably interesting enough (and Malkovich does manage to avoid some of the more hoary cliches of the genre), but still follows a largely predictable path.

Malkovich’s direction is competent, but little more. He is content to let the story play out on its own, which would be fine if the material were stronger, but as it is, he would have been better served to take a firmer hand on the rudder. Bardem fares the best here, playing a much older man with real conviction, and providing at moments the only real moments of insight the film has. Even his character falters at the end, though, and all that’s left is a political-romantic thriller where the politics are unexplored, the romance watery and the thrills decidedly obvious.