Grade: C-

Verdict: An out-of-shape Hollywood whodunit.

What happens when you combine good actors, a talented director and an awful script? "Twisted" answers that question so quickly it could have been made as a kind of negative case study for film students. It's not just that it's a bad movie -- true to its name, it's a lurid, misshapen mess.

Ashley Judd plays Jessica Shepard, a just-promoted San Francisco homicide inspector who drinks too much and sleeps around a lot. Samuel L. Jackson plays John Mills, the peculiarly Obi-Wan police commissioner who raised Jessica after the death of her parents and now guides her career. Andy Garcia plays Mike Delmarco, Jessica's enigmatic and possibly predatory new partner, who directs their first case together as they hit the streets searching for a serial killer.

Guess what? One by one, all the men Jessica recently had one-night stands with turn up bludgeoned to death.

Along with the always welcome David Strathairn, who plays a chilly police psychiatrist, Judd, Jackson and Garcia form a seemingly solid cast. And Philip Kaufman (who directed such wonderfully offbeat films as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Henry and June") tries his best, with help from cinematographer Peter Deming, to build some suspense by making the City by the Bay into a ghostly twilight zone of shadows and fog. But there's no saving Sarah Thorp's essentially implausible story, which is a ghoulish blend of sentimentality and psychotic reactions. She continually trades on the notion of true blue loyalty among cops, then just as often presents them as brawling bully boys, a coin flip away from the murderous maniacs they pursue. As one patrolman quips about the detectives, "They get turned on by corpses." In interviews, Judd has touted her character as a strong "female lead who is ready to take on the sexual double standard and stand up to any man who challenges her." Thorp's story actually suggests that Mills, her mentor and the commissioner, may have helped her up through the ranks. But if Jessica's standing up means having random, edgy sex, punching out both perps and cops with equal abandon, and dealing with her volatile emotions by going home alone every night, downing a bottle of wine and passing out on the floor, then Judd is right. The twists and sympathetic turns in "Twisted" are rooted in the tabloid back story of the childhood trauma Jessica suffered when her father murdered her cheating mother, then committed suicide. She's long suspected that she could be a bad seed and wonders if her tormented blackouts could mean that the killer she's trying to find is inside her. For the audience, trying to figure out who done it becomes a futile exercise. It could be just about anyone who hasn't been beaten to a bloody pulp by the end of the movie. Not surprisingly, that includes Judd, Jackson and Garcia, who at least get to fight it out to see who will be the last actor standing.