Watching the Detectives is the story of Neil (Cillian Murphy), a gangly goof who runs Gumshoe Video, a cute indie shop that caters to film nerds. And what nerds they are, arguing about anime and which version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is superior. If you just read that and immediately said, “The ’70s version is much better than the ’50s version!” then you’d not only be correct, but also identify with Neil and his merry band of nerd cronies.

Enter Violet (Lucy Liu, who as this movie confirms, was good in Kill Bill and that’s it). She’s cute, strange, quotes Fletch — Neil is intrigued. Very soon the two are dating, but there’s a hitch — she’s crazy, prone to concocting elaborate dramas each day to fuck with him (i.e., hiring actors to pose as detectives and spy on him, pretending to be kidnapped, etc.).

There’s some good supporting performances by Neil’s best friends, who live at his store, but even their initially smart geek-speak degenerates into baby talk, as if the writer just gave up towards the end of the film. It’s totally ridiculous, and represents the worst side of pop culture fans who are unable to engage with reality. On a first date, do you: have drinks or food, go for a walk and go to a movie? Or do you stage some elaborate scheme where you break into a swimming pool, steal a picnic basket and play with kittens?

The film succumbs to Benny and Joon syndrome — where a character’s “quirkiness” reaches a point of terminal whimsy that becomes insufferable, and where a film insists that love will cure the characters of their craziness. It’s the movie tendency — romantic comedies being the most egregious offenders — to posit mental illness as some sort of performance art.

Not that Watching the Detectives puts a label on Liu’s character, or bothers to explain just who she is or what she does outside of her bizarre, random behaviour. The latter half of the movie is confusing as hell, mired in her crazy schemes. Eventually, it squeezes in a pat conclusion about balancing adventure and reality — you know, how sometimes it’s nice to stay home and watch the basketball game on TV, rather than breaking into a school gym and playing by candlelight. As if that excuses having everyone behave like first-year art students for the rest of the film.