Security guard Trixie Zurbo (Emily Watson, from Breaking the Waves) is suddenly promoted from loser gigs in department stores to a cushy spot in a resort casino. Soon Trixie finds herself on the outskirts of a nebulous plot to blackmail a lecherous right-wing senator (Nick Nolte). When the case escalates into murder, Trixie launches a private campaign to ensure that justice is done.

No one who talks like Trixie could exist in any real society. Granted she's an alienated loner (and, apparently, a virgin), but even under laboratory conditions, no conceivable combination of isolation, thwarted education, and selective cultural exposure could lead to Trixie's whacked-out argot. From beginning to end her dialogue is a stream of malapropisms, non sequiturs, mixed metaphors, and mutant clichés. A representative sample: "There's only one person besides me who knows what I'm going to do and that's me." "Why does everybody have to beat a dead horse to death?" "You're not drinking yourself into Bolivia." "I'm still a little green behind the ears." "The ball is in your camp." Some of these lines are unlikely in the extreme; some are funny. And they never stop coming, as if the film, having first established that Trixie is all by herself out in left field, were intent on making it clear that left field is in the middle of an ocean. It's to Watson's credit that Trixie's determination to make sense of her situation ennobles both her and it, and that the character comes off as both endearing and scary.

The film (which is neither a comedy nor a film noir but some kind of questionable theoretical hybrid of the two) immerses this conceptual oddball in a world that has some of the landmarks of our own world but is, in many ways, an alien place. Trixie seems to be set in the northern Midwest, which is already halfway to Neverland, and its main locations (motel, hotel, restaurant) have the aura of real inauthenticity. The casino is an alternate reality dominated by a lounge comedian (the excellent Nathan Lane) whose career high point was opening for Trini Lopez and whose act consists of imitations of '30s and '40s stars. The most normal characters in the film are also doing impressions: a crooked-mouthed stud (Dermot Mulroney) who's working hard at pretending to be a stud and a sexpot showgirl (Brittany Murphy) who's doing likewise. All the characters, including Trixie herself, really are what they seem to be -- a point that encapsulates the film's romanticism. The utter dopiness of everything becomes lamely transcendent in a 10-minute restaurant conversation between Trixie and Senator Nolte, as the former's inscrutable tickertape zingers and the latter's auto-pilot drunken rants fly past each other like monologues from two parallel universes.

Like Trixie, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, a live-action/animation retread of Jay Ward's beloved cartoon, exists on the border between the tenuously real and the purely imaginary. A 2-D cartoon prologue explains that ever since their show was cancelled, in 1964, Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose have languished in retirement. They're pressed back into service when their perennial adversaries -- criminal mastermind Fearless Leader and bungling spies Boris and Natasha -- launch a cable TV network that turns viewers into zombies. The bulk of the narrative takes place in a live-action landscape in which the three villains morph into humans while Rocky and Bullwinkle become 3-D Industrial Light & Magic animations (with Rocky voiced by a sometimes muffled-sounding June Foray, who created the character).

The film's tone is close to that of the original, but the running jokes about how much/how little America has changed since 1964 are perfunctory and don't get below the surface. The funniest parts are the glimpses of Fearless Leader's zombifying TV shows: the possibly intended irony is that the shows seem more personal (externalizing the obsessive self-images of spies), more visually interesting (with characters moving stiffly in front of cartoonlike strips of sets), and funnier (in the abysmal pointlessness of their jokes) than anything that's actually on TV. Robert De Niro has a good time with the part of Fearless Leader, and ILM doesn't do too badly with Rocky and Bullwinkle, but the most welcome presence in the film is Jonathan Winters, who brings more than a touch of 1964 to his successive cameos.