THIS IS A ONE-STAR 'HOTEL'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Take the last exit off the highway to art movie hell, and you'll probably have to stay at ``The Million Dollar Hotel.''

This is the kind of all-riff, limited-coherence film that only a rock star (in this case, U2's Bono) could dream up and only Wim Wenders, still on the long downhill slide from his 1988 feature film peak ``Wings of Desire,'' could find enough merit in to direct. Misjudged, centerless, consistently irritating and utterly contemptuous of the down-and-out characters it professes to champion, ``Hotel'' also seems oddly generic.

Except for a handful of interesting character tics - Peter Stormare's self-styled ``Fifth Beatle'' and Gloria Stuart's seen-it-all senior stand-out among the addled residents of the title's downtown L.A. flophouse - the film is populated primarily by twitches in search of habitable forms. Unwatchability soon becomes the inevitable result of this, and Wenders sticks so unshakably to his approach - for more than two excruciating hours - that you'd think he was being offputting on purpose.

And if the film gave any indication that the director knew where to go with the material, that might well have been the case. But it doesn't, so at least we don't hate Wim, just what he does to us.

Like the director and writers (besides Bono, whose group's ``Where the Streets Have No Name'' video was shot on the main location's roof, Nicholas Klein also has screenplay credit), the lead actors seem bereft of purpose and ideas, but that doesn't prevent them from flailing about too energetically anyway.

Jeremy Davis, who has been carving out an admirably quirky niche for himself in such films as ``Spanking the Monkey'' and ``Saving Private Ryan,'' goes way off the edge - and we're not just talking the told-in- flashback film's giveaway opening - as Tom Tom, the Skid Row hotel's resident attention deficit disorder poster boy. A sweet kid who wants to be liked but is so hypertense that no one can take long doses of him, Tom Tom is in love with withdrawn, damaged-goods Eloise (Milla Jovovich), who, like several of her neighbors, was tossed out of a mental facility for cost-cutting reasons.

Their highly tentative romance is frustrating at best. He has trouble putting together rational sentences while she says things like ``I can't die, I don't exist, I'm fictional.'' Obviously, these kids need a cupidic intervention, and who better to play fairy godmother than Mel Gibson?

Well, just about anybody. But would anybody else be convinced that playing the whole role in a metal body brace would give them art house cred?

See, Gibson's hard-barking Agent Skinner had to have his third arm (or was it really desire's wing?) removed from his back in order to be taken seriously by the FBI, conformist organization that it is. He's rousting the hotel's tenants because one of their number took a flying leap off the roof, and it turns out he was the slumming son of a billionaire media baron. Did he jump or was he pushed? You'll have to sit through to the end if you want to find out. God be with you.

Somehow the murder investigation turns into an art scam, all so a snooty dealer can be brought in to reinforce the tedious point that people who live outside the Million Dollar are crazier than those within its peeling walls. This plotline, if you're charitable enough to call it that, involves stolen Julian Schnabel paintings covered with tar.

In these scenes, if nothing else, Wenders locates the perfect visual metaphor for the entire gummed-up project. When this thing was being shot, which was some time ago, he probably couldn't foresee the irony that mediocre painter Schnabel would direct one of the most artistically accomplished films of the season, ``Before Night Falls,'' while Wenders himself. ... Well, maybe he should consider a future in tar painting.

``THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL''

(Rated R: Language, drug use, nudity, violence)

The stars: Mel Gibson, Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Jimmy Smits, Gloria Stuart, Peter Stormare, Amanda Plummer.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Nicholas Klien and Bono. Produced by Bruce Davey, Deepak Nayar, Wenders, Klein and Bono. Released by Lions Gate Films.

Running time: Two hours, 2 minutes.

Playing: UA Marketplace, Pasadena; Beverly Center Cineplex, West Hollywood.

Our rating: One stars