One time I tried to build a car out of four turtles and a whip.

I ran into problems pretty fast. First, it turned out one of the turtles was an Italian species, but my axles weren't metric, so I had to throw it out. I replaced it with an especially fat toad, which just led to all kinds of suspension problems. Once I got on the road, you know what I discovered? Turtle shells don't really react to whipping. I went home for a sledgehammer to see if that would spur them on, but the initial trial was less than encouraging.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Some designs aren't meant to work no matter how much tinkering you do. Halfway through the erotic thriller Chloe, I was reminded this is true of stories, too — no matter how clever it may be, any turn of events that requires you to rehash the same scene three times in a row is a big fat finger pointing at a story problem. In Chloe's case, not only was that problem boring, but it also gives away the very twist it's trying to protect.

When Liam Neeson misses his own birthday party, his wife Julianne Moore becomes suspicious he's cheating. She hires prostitute Amanda Seyfried to see if she can seduce him.

Soon, Seyfried is making regular reports of their budding affair. Moore is devastated, but she's intrigued, too — perhaps as much by Seyfried as by her husband's depravity.

Which might not sound like much plot, but who needs that when you've got Moore-on-Seyfried action. Sure, pretend like that wasn't the first question on your mind. It's the first thing I'd ask and I don't even particularly care. Not after watching Seyfried in the tame-as-a-dead-retriever Dear John.

Chloe isn't any more exciting than that cinematic sleeping pill. The particulars of its plot requires almost all the action to happen offscreen, then get summarized verbally. That could work if the script were especially sharp or funny, but writer Erin Cressida Wilson's dialogue is just decent. If they were talking about exploding robots or some sort of society where bears keep human pets, that might fly.

Instead, we get tepid descriptions of coffee shop meet-ups and greenhouse handjobs. Several years later (real years — covering movie-years with Chloe's pacing would take so long you'd walk out of the theater into Planet of the Bears), stuff finally happens.

And it turns out to be as predictable as the time you arrive home every night. (I mean, that's some other guy crouched in your bushes. Unless you think he's cute.) That's when it becomes an arthouse redux of Obsessed, which not by coincidence also sucked.

It's saved, to a degree, by Moore, whose confused curiosity is believable despite being writ so large across her face you can see it with your eyes closed. That appears to be director Atom Egoyan's style here, though, as Seyfried does the same overemoting to lesser results. Not that she has much to work with. Typical of erotic obsession stories, the weirdo's character is as thin as your drapes.

It's not a total disaster — there's Moore and that decent writing, and notwithstanding the large performances he goes after, Egoyan's restrained direction keeps it from becoming a hysterical mess like most of its subgenre buddies. But "undisastrous" is not my definition of art or entertainment.

Grade: C-