Max Headroom as Barbie

Simone is a film that is good, quite good, out of the gate. But by the time the end credits roll, it has left you exhausted from the effort of trying to like a movie that lost its focus somewhere around the midpoint.

You try to like it because the film has Al Pacino in marginal form, and marginal for Pacino is great compared to, say, Costner at the top of his game. It is also admirable for getting some fresh gags out of a not-so-fresh idea: replacing live movie actors with digital ones (Final Fantasy did that last year). While some of the jokes are strong, the satire doesn’t hold out for its entire running length because Simone simply goes haywire with its premise, becoming too outrageous for its own britches.

When snot-nosed actress Veronica (Winona Ryder, in a nasty cameo) walks off the set of her latest film, she leaves her director, Viktor Taransky (Pacino) with tons of unusable footage. Studio executive and former wife Elaine (Catherine Keener) suggests that they scrap the picture and count their losses.

Viktor vows to complete his film, but can’t find a replacement actress. As he’s clearing out his office, a strange computer-crazed man approaches him, declaring he has created the answer to all of Viktor’s problems. Enter Simone.

Simone is a computer generated super actress Viktor can control with God-like authority. No wardrobe hassles, no bitching on the set, just press a few buttons and get a great performance, every inflection, every bat of the eye, programmed by the director. Ideally, this would lower budgets, quicken shoot schedules and, more importantly, prevent the director from having to remove all the cherry Mike and Ikes from candy dishes to appease some ingénue’s whims.

Viktor inserts Simone into his film, and it’s a hit, propelling the fake actress to instant stardom. More films follow, as do modeling contracts and a singing career featuring live holographic performances in front of thousands. It’s relatively easy to accept that Viktor could control all of these Simone appearances from his studio lair because this is a satire, with only slight links to reality.

In reality, Simone is unbilled actress Rachel Wood, a dead ringer for Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (who actually doubles for the virtual actress at one point). The filmmakers have left it a mystery as to how much computer play has gone into the Simone image, but it is my guess that more than 90 percent of the Simone footage is pure Wood.

When the film works, it is mildly amusing. The funniest sequence involves Viktor trying to kill off Simone by trashing her image. He makes her into a chain smoker and places her into I Am Pig, a supposedly Simone-directed project featuring her in a wedding dress eating from a trough. Of course, the public sees this as genius because it has Simone’s stamp on it.

It’s about this point that the film runs out of gas, bludgeoning its premise to death and forcing Pacino to use every acting trick in his bag to keep things moving forward. By the time the film is over, he looks more fatigued than he did as the sleep-deprived detective in Insomnia.

A subplot involving Viktor and Elaine’s efforts to reconcile is dreary, as is the underused presence of Pruitt Taylor Vance and Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) as tabloid reporters.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol (who also wrote The Truman Show) should have calmed down, removed a few plot elements and focused on what worked in his movie. Instead, he has overloaded Simone with unnecessary data, and the system has crashed.