What has happened to Wim Wenders? asks David Parkinson.

Not the Wenders of those overrated slabs of art-house middlebrow Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, but the politically committed visionary in the vanguard of New German Cinema, whose inspired insights into American cultural imperialism resulted in such masterpieces as The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick, Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road.

There have been glimmers of the old style in the documentaries Tokyo-Ga and Notebook on Cities and Clothes, but on the fiction front it's been a catalogue of misfires culminating in the lamentable Until the End of the World and Faraway, So Close. But nothing thus far has plunged so low as The Million Dollar Hotel, which was based on an idea by the U2 front man, Bono. The opening sequence promises much, as a digitally enhanced helicopter shot of the Los Angeles skyline is accompanied by U2's The First Time and we seem set for another Wenders treatise on the American Dream. But instead, we get a self-consciously postmodernist reworking of Grand Hotel for the indie generation (of which Wenders considers himself to be the godfather).

It's LA 2001, if anyone is interested, and Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies) pauses on his plunge from the roof of the titular hotel to recall the 14 days that drove him to suicide. When he only had to cope with an Amerindian artist (Jimmy Smits), the Fifth Beatle (Peter Stormare) and an alcoholic eccentric (Bud Cort), Tom Tom could just keep on an even keel. But with the appearance of Mel Gibson's neck-braced special agent and Milla Jovovich's ethereal beauty, who claims she's a fictional character, he goes over the edge in every sense. The dialogue is mostly drivel, the performances either pretentious or pointless and the direction self-indulgent to the verge of incomprehension. This is a mind-numbingly tedious experience and a new low in a great film-maker's descent into artistic ignominy.