It's not easy being queen.

If your half-sister isn't locking you up in the Tower of London, the Pope is issuing nasty decrees about you. And when you finally take control of your reign and your image by chopping off all your hair, covering yourself in pasty pancake makeup, and donning a funky wig, the court gapes at you like they're Michael Jackson's entourage after his first face peel and rhinoplasty.

Such are the tribulations propelling Elizabeth, the first English-language film helmed by Pakistani director Shekhar Kapur. The remarkable Cate Blanchett (Oscar and Lucinda) heads up a small armada of classy British art-film actors in this attempt to compress the early part of Queen Elizabeth I's reign into what are supposed to be two gripping hours of violence and intrigue.

No fusty BBC niceties here J Kapur wants Elizabeth's castle to be as dangerous, brutal, and lusty as Scorsese's mean streets or Aaron Spelling's Melrose Place apartments.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth's plot is its least effective element. It certainly ought to be more engrossing than it is, what with all the bludgeonings and poisonings. The film opens on the horrible but stunningly directed spectacle of Protestants burned alive at the stake before a vicious mob. It's so grim and effective that it sets Elizabeth up to be a fascinatingly bloody historical yarn in the tradition of the unforgettable Queen Margot. And for a while, the film sustains that level of interest.

But after the 25-year-old Elizabeth (Blanchett) takes the throne, the story loses steam, proceeding from abortive romance to escalating atrocities without any sense of narrative trajectory or mounting tension.

This is in spite of the cast's best efforts. Geoffrey Rush is appropriately dangerous and opaque as Elizabeth's wily ally Walsingham, sort of a Renaissance-era Vernon Jordan with less obvious loyalties and a capacity for mayhem.

And Joseph Fiennes is smarmy and earnest as the Virgin Queen's one true love who never quite panned out, though his unfaithful doofuss-ness qualifies him to go on a 16th-century daytime talk show: "Men Who Are Dogs and the Queens Who Love Them." Both Rush and Fiennes, oddly enough, are also featured players in the upcoming Shakespeare In Love, another Elizabethan drama; it's as though once they got fitted for their leggings they wanted to make the most of them.

Blanchett's the stand-out, though, plumbing in Queen Elizabeth depths of decency, self-doubt, and ferocity in spite of the fact that screenwriter Michael Hirst cobbles much of her dialogue together from public speeches, which is akin to writers 300 years from now depicting George Bush as going around talking to his wife and kids about points of light and lines in the sand. Which, actually, he probably does.

Elizabeth's biggest selling point is its look. Costume designer Alexandra Byrne, who did royal pomp in Branagh's Hamlet and everyday restraint in the Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion, here dresses the actors in period ensembles which are convincing, artful, and gorgeous all at once. And Kapur frames his interiors as rich compositions of blacks interspersed by occasional explosions of color.

But being nice to look at isn't quite enough, after a while. The accelerating acts of violence ought to exude an indulgent Jacobean goriness but instead feel like warmed-over gangster motifs.

The Vatican dispatches a hit man of the cloth to knock off the queen, and the first thing he does upon landing on the beach is drag a guy to a tide pool and kill him with a handy rock, like it's just something he does whenever he travels, the way other people get drunk on airplanes or steal hotel towels. He then proceeds to infiltrate the castle with remarkable ease in spite of his scary flowing evil-guy robes. In Elizabeth, you don't mess with the Catholics.

Then a servant girl perishes from a poisoned dress in an assassination attempt that might have been dreamed up by a twisted Mr. Blackwell. There's even a montage of murders just like the one at the end of Goodfellas, only with choral hymns instead of "Layla." The result is a narrative resolution Elizabeth triumphs over her adversaries, as you might expect, but at a price with no visceral oomph. Just an intellectual appreciation for a project masterfully assembled, and a vaguely resentful suspicion that if you'd gone to see Enemy of the State instead you might have gotten the new Star Wars preview.

H-T Rating: B