Dakota Johnson in Cymbeline (Lionsgate)

If nothing else, Cymbeline might be an undeniable sign that the habit of updating Shakespeare’s plays through “gritty” cinematic reinterpretations, stacked with movie stars, might finally be at its end.

After 2011’s Ralph Fiennes-Gerard Butler starrer Coriolanus came and went, we have had a solid four years between self-indulgent, pointless reimaginings of one of the Bard’s tragedies. Joss Whedon’s 2012 Much Ado About Nothing gets a pass, because there was a real comedic energy and style to it, and at no point did you wonder why on earth it was made. (Though it still felt a bit like Whedon cleansing his palate between helming the fun and commercial Avengers movies). But as for Cymbeline, are there any more obscure tragedies for artistically adrift Hollywood types to scrape from the Bard’s lesser known late period? Let’s hope not.

It seems like there are two options with this sort of thing. You can fully honor the rigorous exactitude of Shakespearean’s text. Or you can have the actors speak like normal everyday people and allow the rich characters and ingenious plotting to emerge, free of the burdens of ye olde diction. Cymbeline opts for the former, which might not be so bad if the actors could find a way to really bring the material to life. The only one who really manages to do that is Ethan Hawke as the devious, lecherous Iachimo, but he only gets a few scenes. Somehow, he finds a way to have fun with the material, and it’s pretty delightful whenever he’s onscreen.

The key players in this convoluted tale are Imogen (Dakota Johnson), the daughter of a drug lord and biker gang leader, Cymbeline (Ed Harris). Imogen is supposed to marry Cloten (Anton Yelchin), the creepy son of Cymbeline’s second wife, simply called the Queen (Milla Jovovich). Imogen refuses and secretly marryies her true love, Posthumus (Penn Badgley). Cymbeline banishes Posthumus from the city when he discovers this.

In his misery, Posthumus consorts with the unsavory Iachimo (Ethan Hawke), who bets Posthumus that he can sleep with his wife. Posthumus is so convinced of his wife’s true love for him that he takes the bet. Iachimo, using iPhone camera trickery, falsely convinces the gullible young man that he has bedded Imogen, and so Posthumus immediately orders his underling, Pisanio (John Leguizamo), to kill Imogen. The continual double crosses and tragic misunderstandings could be ripe for great cinema, but the lack of energy, endless tortuous speechifying, and the sheer volume of characters and plot obscure the play’s logic.

For the most part, the actors seem committed with imparting the serious gravity of their words and not screwing up the tortuous phrasings. Everyone murmurs and grumbles, which can be fine if they build to a crescendo, but no one really lets loose. Shakespearean language was meant to be performed with some, you know, theatricality and gusto, not mumblecore naturalism.

If you’re a Delroy Lindo fiend, you’ll be very happy. In a small but important role, he comes close to stealing the film. But mostly, you’ll just bitterly reflect on how wasted Lindo has been lo these many years. Johnson is quite good as the fair Imogen, admirably merging believable teenage angst with the cumbersome language. Bill Pullman is intriguingly menacing and disheveled, but he has about 80 seconds of screen time. Jovovich has a few lines early on, sings a weird ballad in the middle that seems to go on forever, disappears for an hour, and then becomes the arch-villain at the very end.

For a film that bills itself as gritty on its promotional materials, there’s fairly little violence and zero sex. Yet for all the pretension to gravitas and grit, this film has all of the consequences of a music video, and I don’t necessarily mean this entirely as a barb. In fact, this is probably the best way to approach this. Just enjoy it like a very long, talky, low-energy music video.

Perhaps this boggling project was born from Hawke’s relationship with director and screenwriter Michael Almereyda; they collaborated together on 2000’s tepidly-received Hamlet. Iachimo is a great, juicy role, and Hawke plays it with evident relish, but it’s a fairly minor part, even if his machinations throw the plot into motion. Alas, Cymbeline appears to be that most cringe-worthy of endeavors: a passion project without passion.