Movies love symbols. They are the building blocks of the medium, and are to films what sentences are to novels. Sometimes they are literal, like the shark’s fin in Jaws. And sometimes they are metaphorical – the snowglobe in Citizen Kane. Sometimes, however, they are just dumb.

The starry urban ensemble The Air I Breathe is full of dumb symbols – meaningless shots of irrelevant objects that strain for significance in a movie completely devoid of the same. Here a long, lingering shot of a silken scarf floating in the breeze means, like, freedom and stuff, while an incongruous close-up of a butterfly means that, you know, change is afoot.

The characters too – and this is the best bit – have symbolic names. They are Happiness (Forest Whitaker), Pleasure (Brendan Fraser), Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Love (Kevin Bacon). Yes, really. But again, the symbolism is meaningless and hides poorly drawn pulp figures plucked from the pages of modern noir. Thus, in metropolitan USA (actual location: Mexico City), the neurotic stockbroker Happiness is wildly in debt to a local mobster, Fingers (Andy Garcia, shouting Pacino-style throughout).

Pleasure is a lethal mob enforcer who falls for Sorrow, a dizzy, Britney-lite starlet singer tied into an illegal management deal with Fingers. Meanwhile, desperate doctor Love (again, really) needs Sorrow’s rare blood donation to save his best friend’s dying wife, mercifully called Gina (Julie Delpy).

As you’d expect, it’s all handled with leaden pretension. The dialogue is a hoot. “When a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon,” wonders Happiness, “does it realise how beautiful it has become, or does it just see itself as a caterpillar?”

The film, written and directed by Jieho Lee, is allegedly based on an old Chinese proverb about the four emotional cornerstones of life (happiness, love etc). Yet ironically, it evokes only the cheapest kind of “Confucius say . . .” banalities in an attempt to claim a profundity that it clearly hasn’t earned.

15, 95mins

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• DVD

• Oscars

• Bollywood

Editor's choice

• The top 10 fan versus band scuffles
• Mamma Mia! The first review
• Times critics' 20 best films for kids