BRUTAL `END OF VIOLENCE' HOLDS UNFULFILLED PROMISE.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Critic

It starts out all right. The idea that a violence-mongering movie producer would get victimized by the casual brutality of the very culture he helped create is one of the more intriguing premises of the year. As the new film by European director Wim Wenders (``Paris, Texas,'' ``Wings of Desire'') gets under way, the story, set in Los Angeles, takes directions that promise something rich, thoughtful, even artistic.

But before half an hour has passed, the filmmaker has noodled his way right off the map. Ever the iconoclast, Wenders here is more casually impulsive, more self-indulgent than usual. For all its promising ingredients (including the usual terrific soundtrack), ``The End of Violence'' comes off merely as a collage of elements from an overworked palette.

Even the strong emotional undercurrent of frustrated love, which has been the glue that held some previous Wenders efforts together, is absent here.

Bill Pullman (``Lost Highway,'' ``Independence Day'') plays Mike Max, a wealthy, Malibu-dwelling producer who has made his career on stylish, ultra-violent movies with titles like ``Creative Killing.'' His days consist of juggling crises on his movie sets, overseeing his cash flow, and neglecting his glamorous and bored wife, Paige (Andie MacDowell), who has made up her mind to leave him as the story begins.

Meanwhile, up in Griffith Observatory, where he has a splendid view of the city, a surveillance expert and former NASA employee (Gabriel Byrne) is working on a secret project to blanket the city with high-powered video cameras that will supposedly, home in on street crime and allow police to respond immediately.

The half-baked idea is that this project will mean ``an end to violence.'' Besides allowing the filmmaker to meditate on the contrast between real violent images and manufactured ones, it also feels oddly like a variation on a theme from ``Wings of Desire'' - in which a remote, emotionally repressed angel looked down on the city and longed to be a part of the human activity there. (There's even a line where a government agent tells Byrne that, unlike when he worked at NASA, ``you're not looking at the heavens from Earth, you're looking at Earth from the heavens.'')

Actually, this whole conceit is so manufactured and unconvincing, the movie collapses every time Byrne's character comes on the screen.

Down on ``Earth,'' things aren't much better, as the producer, Max, gets carjacked and nearly killed by two clownish, ineffectual thugs who seemed just as distracted in their task as the movie's director. Max turns the tables on them and kills them both with their own weapons - a revelatory experience that somehow convinces him, finally, that violence is the wrong path.

Inexplicably on the run from the law (as if self-defense and his phalanx of lawyers couldn't get him off the hook), Max becomes the project of a callow, persistent police investigator (Loren Dean) who falls in love with a stuntwoman (Traci Lind) on one of Max's movies.

Meanwhile, Max has taken refuge in the home of some Mexican gardeners, and up on the hilltop, Byrne is getting the hots for his Salvadoran maid (Marisol Padilla Sanchez), a beautiful torture victim.

It's interesting how in this well-populated portrait of Los Angeles, Wenders finds roles for Latinos only as gardeners and maids (and simplistic, idealized ones). Nothing too enlightened - or even observant - about that.

On the plus side, Wenders' collaboration with cinematographer Pascal Rabaud (in his film debut) yields some haunting imagery.

If only the visuals had been linked to a more well-thought-out story.

Reportedly, Wenders and screenwriter Nicholas Klein cobbled this project together quickly to fill the down time after another planned movie got delayed.

One gets the feeling they watched other movies about L.A., like Lawrence Kasdan's 1991 ``Grand Canyon,'' which this plot and structure resemble, and Robert Altman's collagelike ``Short Cuts,'' which this project doesn't hold a candle to.

``The End of Violence'' comes across as kind of a fun exercise with someone else's money - little of which is ever likely to be repaid, since it's not all that much fun for the audience.

Public radio disc jockey Chris Douridas of KCRW has a small part as a technician who reports to Byrne, Ry Cooder (``Paris, Texas'') did the evocative, industrial-sounding score, and Wenders favorites like Los Lobos, Bono, Tom Waits, Michael Stipe, DJ Shadow, Sam Phillips and others are on the soundtrack.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The End of Violence'' (R; language, adult content).

The stars: Bill Pullman, Andie MacDowell, Gabriel Byrne.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Wim Wenders. Screenplay by Nicholas Klein. Produced by Deepak Nayar, Wim Wenders, Nicholas Klein. Released by MGM.

Running time: Two hours, two minutes.

Playing: Landmark's Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, West Los Angeles; Laemmle's Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

Our rating: Two Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Bill Pullman stars as a successful Hollywood producer and Andie MacDowell portrays his wife, Paige, in ``The End of Violence.''