I haven’t read the series of graphic novels on which Watchmen is based, but I assume that the filmmakers wanted to make something that could be watched by anyone. Perhaps director Zack Snyder, who was so successful with 300, in trying to remain faithful to the graphic novels, has crammed too much into too little time, perhaps in hopes of inspiring viewers to seek out the originals. Well, I have no such desire. In fact, in the future, I plan to avoid the franchise at every turn. A lot of what’s onscreen is just bad acting and bad editing.

Watchmen is set in a parallel universe in which the Nixon era has been extended by that President’s election to a third term. The cold war is heating up, and nuclear holocaust seems inevitable. The superheroes of the past are needed, but they’ve gone their own ways. When one of them, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), dies in a fall from his high-rise window, his murder unites the other remaining "masks" . . . sort of. All of the Watchmen are long on ego and short on stability. There’s Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a man so broken he wears a sock mask that expresses only an undulating, ever-changing ink blot. Then there’s Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), a sort of polyester Batman, who’s gone to seed and now hides in complacency, though he’s still romanced by Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman). The most interesting is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who was atomized, then somehow reassembled as a giant, blue-glowing stud, and has enough angst about his personality to match all of the others.

Silk Spectre II has left Dr. Manhattan for Nite Owl II, which causes the Dr. to go to Mars to sulk. Silk Spectre II follows him to Mars to convince him to return to save mankind from itself. Meanwhile, the Comedian’s murderer is a villain-savior who turns out to be one of the Watchmen’s own.

One thing that makes Watchmen so hard to watch is that none of the characters is really likable, though the Comedian and Rorschach come closest. Crudup does the best acting, but his Dr. Manhattan is cold, aloof, and not particularly sympathetic. Haley acts well, too -- his Rorschach is actually interesting -- but the rest of the cast are so-so actors suffering under an apparent lack of direction. Except for Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, the actors’ voices are not even particularly distinguishable from one another, and the action sequences are separated by interminable scenes of stupid dialogue woodenly delivered.

Those action scenes contain a lot of violence, including some that pushed my limits. One, in which a guy’s hands are cut off with a saw, is so over the top that the squeamish might run for cover. The film’s basic look is, I have ascertained, accurate to the source, but watching so many filtered, steely-blue images for so long -- 162 minutes -- got on my nerves. Afterward, when I emerged from the theater, the bright sunlight looked unnatural. Perhaps that was the intent.

There might be some really good ideas here, such as "The Watchmen watch us, but who watches them?" Watchmen might have worked better as a mini-series, or a few different movies, or perhaps (my last choice) an even longer single film with a long intermission, or any of the above -- but something shot with an eye to making a good dramatic movie, not merely re-creating onscreen the pages of a comic book. As it is, enduring these unlikable Watchmen as they postured and postulated in between some fairly decent action sequences was a bloody bore and a waste of time.

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