There's a veil of artifice clinging to every aspect of "The Lovers," a thoroughly unconvincing time-traveling epic costume drama pairing a miscast Josh Hartnett and Bollywood beauty Bipasha Basu.
Joffe seems well aware that this is a story not worth telling ... the filmmaking is so hopelessly uninspired that Hartnett's Scottish accent is somehow not its most glaring flaw.
A slew of half-baked characters and a derivative, white-man-in-a-foreign-land plot line make it hard to recommend, despite a handful of inspired moments.
