Robbery and romance collide in Breaking and Entering, a surprisingly lethargic drama, especially considering the high-powered talent involved here. Written and directed by Anthony Minghella and starring such fine actors as Jude Law, Juliette Binoche and Robin Wright Penn, this human interest story about intersecting lives in contemporary London piqued my curiosity but failed to deliver the emotional wallop I expected. 

Law portrays Will, a landscape architect working on plans to improve London’s King’s Crossing neighborhood. Serving as the central focus of the story, Will spends a great deal of time at work while his longtime live-in girlfriend Liv (Wright Penn) worries about Bea (Poppy Rogers), her autistic 13-year-old daughter. Although not Bea’s biological father, Will has cared for her as one during most of her life. However, it’s easy to discern the waning passion between the two adults in Bea’s life.

Meanwhile, after teenage Miro (Rafi Gavron) breaks into Will’s workplace and steals his architectural drawings plus his laptop, he ponders over what he should do about it. The right answer? Probably anything other than setting up a stakeout to find out the thief’s identity -- but that’s exactly the way Will handles the situation. He ends up following the boy to see where he lives, then meeting the lad’s beautiful widowed mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) -- a refugee from Bosnia -- under false pretenses and having an affair with her. Of course, when Amira finds out about Will’s real reason for coming to her home, she’s not a bit happy about it. However, she has some tricks of her own up her sleeve, and she may have to use them to save her son.

While working on this Breaking and Entering review, I realized something strange: writing about the movie is more exciting than watching the film itself. For some reason or other, this picture came across as cold and distant to me. I couldn’t get involved with the characters or with their problems no matter how much I wanted to, perhaps because of a lack of energetic performances. Law brings very little of the charm he displayed in The Holiday or in Alfie to his character; Binoche looks luminous as always, but her acting seems stilted in comparison to her sensitive work in films like Chocolat and The English Patient; and Wright Penn appears lost, perhaps because her lines must be delivered with a Swedish accent.                    

Making a meaningful film about the problems of immigrants and class differences in today’s London is certainly a noble goal, but these issues deserve a more affective (and effective) treatment than Breaking and Entering achieves. My recommendation? Interested viewers should check out Dirty Pretty Things, which is available on DVD, instead.

(Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and rated “R” for sexuality and language.)