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Dour dystopian social allegory meets comic-book male-adolescent revenge fantasy in Equilibrium, a Fahrenheit 451 rip-off tooled, ironically, for those who don't read.

Ray Bradbury's classic 1953 novel (made into a film 13 years later by Francois Truffaut) details a futuristic society in which reading has been outlawed and books are collected and burned by Gestapo-like "firemen." Libria, the post-World War III police state in Equilibrium, is dedicated to an even more sinister if less likely goal: "To seek out and eradicate the true source of man's inhumanity to man - his ability to feel."

To this end, all citizens must ingest a daily dose of Prozium II, a sort of super-Prozac that functions as the literal opiate of the masses. Talk about the Triumph of the Pill: The medicated masses seem to spend most of their time marching beneath gray zeppelins, Albert Speer-esque skyscrapers and giant TV screens on which the image of their supposedly benevolent Big Brother, "the Father," lectures that "emotion is a disease."

Order is maintained in this near-future world not by "firemen" but by the deadly "Clerics," an elite squad of black-garbed brownshirts who destroy contraband art, antiques, pinup calendars, disco balls and puppy dogs along with the odd copy of Yeats and even the Mona Lisa itself. The movie begins with a scene in which Leonardo's masterpiece - its authenticity determined by some sort of ultraviolet scan - is torched with a flame-thrower after the painting is discovered beneath some floorboards. No wonder the sensitive, literal underground of Libria is fomenting revolution, even though war is over and murder nonexistent (except when committed by the government).

The notion of radical art preservationists engaging in armed conflict with martial arts-trained philistines could have made for a ripe satire, but Equilibrium is sober as a judge, if that phrase still means anything in the era of Judge Judy and Judge Joe Brown. The chief sobersides is John Preston (Christian Bale), Libria's top Cleric, who didn't interfere when his wife was "arrested and incinerated" for committing the "sense offense" of, apparently, love. Explains Preston: "I live to safeguard the continuity of this great society."

Of course, we know that Preston is going to experience a change of heart, which leads not just to his emotional rebirth but to absurd Matrix-style bursts of "the old ultraviolence," to borrow a phrase from yet another futuristic fantasy. Debuting writer-director Kurt Wimmer apparently wants viewers to accept Equilibrium as a socially conscious cautionary fable, but the Cleric's killing sprees reveal not only the relative simple-mindedness of this Orwellian pastiche (compare this film to Steven Spielberg's thematically similar Minority Report) but also a bet-hedging attempt to appeal to moviegoers who probably wouldn't feel they were missing much if paintings were burned and books were banned.

Unfortunately for Wimmer, violence cuts both ways, even in a Matrix wannabe from Miramax. Despite the righteousness of the revolutionary cause, audiences these days may find it hard to identify with the film's freedom fighters, who function essentially as terrorists, plotting assassinations and blowing up buildings.

The cast also includes Taye Diggs, who plays Preston's ambitious Cleric partner, and second-billed Emily Watson, who probably filmed her few scenes as a "sense offender" on a spare weekend.

Star ratings: Zero stars - stay home. One star - only if you're desperate. Two stars - a mild entertainment. Three stars - good stuff. Four stars - don't miss it.

- John Beifuss: 529-2394