It's an easy picture to ridicule. After a while, you almost feel as if the stars are making fun of it. Or at least you wish Angelina Jolie, with her radiant presence and Panavision lips, and Clive Owen, with his brisk, existentialist cool, were smart enough to do so. After the "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" movies, with their globe-trotting superficiality and numbing imbecility, Ms. Jolie must feel she owes her fans something serious. Unfortunately, she is starring in a movie even more benumbed and superficial, a liberal video game that demeans the very refugees it tries to spotlight.

Her good-heartedness is probably the reason she chose to star in this film, which opens today nationwide, about a shallow young woman, Sarah Jordan, who is shaken out of her insular existence in 1984. That's when the dashing Dr. Nick Callahan (Mr. Owen) invades the fund-raiser she is attending with her new husband, Henry (Linus Roache). A band has slammed through the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" The song's title asks a spiritual question that will soon come to haunt not only Sarah but also the audience.

Nick has the gall to parade a slender Ethiopian boy named Jojo (Keelan Anthony) in front of the rich Londoners at the party just to get their attention. Sarah is so moved by Nick's socially conscious performance art that it doesn't occur to her how immensely self-serving his act is. In fact, not one person remarks that this supposed hero is depriving the child of dignity. Nick's act may not be racist, but it proves he is just as callous as those who have anted up to drink Champagne for charity. Hauled away by the police, Nick is sprung by the mysterious Steiger (Yorick Van Wageningen, whose curdled cunning is one of the movie's few high spots).

He tries to recruit Nick for C.I.A. work in the danger zones where he does his good deeds. When Nick walks away, he doesn't even mention Jojo — the final insult.

"Beyond Borders," with a script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, tries to dramatize the chasm between Sarah and Nick. That metaphorical land mass is supposed to be her middle-class naïveté and his hot-tempered, compassionate altruism. But they're much closer than they think — a pair of noble idiots.

Inspired by his example, she raises money and follows him to Ethiopia with medical supplies and food. He repays her kindness with blithe cruelty. "I can get you a picture of a rich white girl holding a black baby," he snorts as she cradles an African child wasted from malnutrition whom she has just saved from a vulture.

This scene might have a little more credibility if Sarah weren't swathed in fresh white linen.

Nick almost ruins a delicate negotiation with an Ethiopian army colonel determined to hijack the supplies until Elliott (Noah Emmerich), one of Nick's co-workers, steps up to ease tensions. "He's got a lot on his hands right now," Elliott says, trying to explain Nick's hostility. The movie never even provides a sense of how good Nick is at his work, which might explain why his colleagues put up with tantrums that endanger their efforts and lives.

A few years later, after predictable strains in her marriage — just as predictable as Nick's exhibition of vulnerability — Sarah abandons her son to join Nick in Cambodia. He makes a destructive deal with Steiger that puts everyone in jeopardy and leads to a standoff that has a stomach-churning excitement: a grenade is placed in an infant's hand, and the baby cries while the situation intensifies. After all the trouble Nick has caused, Sarah clutches him and moans, "Nick, this wasn't your fault."

Then they finally tryst. The sweat beads seductively on their skins while they expel plumes of cigarette smoke that accentuate their glamorously gaunt jawlines.

It's probably fitting that one of the years that "Beyond Borders" covers is 1989, roughly the era of "Cry Freedom," "A Dry White Season" and other garish white-man's-burden films about third world misery. Sarah and Nick shoulder all the pain of the world and barely have time for themselves; isn't it awful? The director, Martin Campbell, an accomplished action filmmaker, must have forgotten that in the 1940's "Casablanca" had the good sense to have Rick note that the troubles of two people don't amount to a hill of beans. "Beyond Borders" is reminiscent of another 40's classic, the smashingly absurd "Duel in the Sun," and is as realistic as another recent film based on actual incidents, the remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

The movie's last section takes place in 1995. Nick is in Chechnya, where he has doubtless placed more refugees at risk in the name of rescuing them; he's the Inspector Clouseau of famine relief. By now, Sarah has added a daughter to her family and leaves the two children behind to find the captured Nick, perhaps because she understands that her skin will look like Limoges china in the flattering lighting reflected from the snow. "You know as well as I do Chechnya is a very dangerous place," her sister (Teri Polo), a reporter, tells her.

A picture of such voluminous silliness and shrill naïveté that crosses a border into insensitivity almost makes you ask why Mr. Campbell bothered to make a movie that dances around real-life horrors. That is, until you realize that it would have been obscene if actual suffering had been so debased and trivialized. A crucial speech has a character talk about stepping on a land mine and hearing a deadly click. In the audience, you'll hear a similar noise and realize all hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.

"Beyond Borders" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has strong language, sexuality and shameless and scandalously cynical re-creations of third world suffering and violence that aren't even relieved by on-screen alcohol consumption.

BEYOND BORDERS

Directed by Martin Campbell; written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen; director of photography, Phil Meheux; edited by Nicholas Beauman; music by James Horner; production designer, Wolf Kroeger; produced by Dan Halsted and Lloyd Phillips; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 127 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Angelina Jolie (Sarah Jordan), Clive Owen (Nick Callahan), Teri Polo (Charlotte Jordan), Linus Roache (Henry Bauford), Noah Emmerich (Elliott Hauser), Keelan Anthony (Jojo) and Yorick Van Wageningen (Steiger).