Skilled performances and atmospheric cinematography fail to save Joel Schumacher's Flawless, a predictable array of overwrought clichs and meddling sideplots.

The film's heart is the forced relationship between two dramatically different residents of the same New York apartment complex. Robert De Niro is Walt Koontz, a bigoted former cop, while Philip Seymour Hoffman is Rusty, a drag queen desperate for a sex change. When Walt suffers a stroke while trying to foil a robbery, he reluctantly turns to Rusty for singing lessons as therapy. Needless to say, the one-time enemies learn there's more to each other than meets the eye.

It sounds contrived, and it is. Worse, the plot suffers from a pervasive staleness. It's as if Schumacher, who both wrote and directed, simply recycled bits and pieces of old scripts. Flawless deals with weighty stuff in tolerance, illness, identity crises, but it doesnt bother to say anything new about these issues. The audience can see the films "can't we all just get along" plot devices from a mile away.

Flawless intends to be something of a comedy, and while it does elicit some chuckles, the screenplay has precious few original moments, comedic or otherwise. At one point, Rusty says: "Theres no romance without finance." It's a joke of "Golden Girls"-caliber at best, but the film tries to pass it off as a piercing one-liner. Meanwhile, the story about Walt and Rusty is further marred by a useless and laborious subplot about a gangster trying to find out who has his money.

As director, Schumacher effectively conveys the down-and-dirty grit of New York, but as writer he should have spent more time exploring the down-and-dirty grit of his protagonists. The screenplay itself does precious little to expand upon the two stereotypes of a bigot and a drag queen. That task falls into the actors hands. Fortunately, De Niro and Hoffman have very capable hands indeed, and they almost manage to elevate the script in spite of itself not quite, but almost.

The scene-stealer is Hoffman, who follows up on his fine work in Happiness and Boogie Nights. With his undulating voice and quick reversals of emotion, he nicely portrays Rusty's painful limbo between lonely man and gaudy transvestite. Reading in between his frequently trite lines, Hoffman exposes Rusty's inner vulnerability. De Niro, too, raises his Walt above mere caricature. His subtle expressions reveal the pain of an independent man losing his mobility while his cautious moves towards Rusty make the burgeoning friendship relatively believable.

Ultimately, however, Hoffman and De Niro are stymied by the limitations of the film's concept. Flawless just doesn't have enough to say. Because it never ventures beyond the audiences expectations, it fails to challenge. And so it fails to truly entertain. Flawless preaches that we should look beneath the surface. Too bad the film didn't take its own advice.