Entertainment

BAD PITT

AS pretentious and lengthy as its title, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is a gorgeous snooze, somewhere between imitation Terrence Malick and a feature version of star Brad Pitt’s notorious Vanity Fair layout with Angelina Jolie and their faux kids.

Pitt is the latest in a long line of pretty actors – everyone from Tyrone Power to, most recently, Colin Farrell in “American Outlaws” – to play the legendary robber, here seen alternately as a psychotic killer and weary, bullet-scarred family man approaching both middle age and the end of his life.

As the film opens in 1881, most of Jesse’s original band are long dead, and his brother Frank (played briefly by Sam Shepard) retires after one last train robbery (which is about as exciting as this movie gets).

As Frank was much smarter than Jesse, the latter spends his final months hiding under an assumed identity and planning jobs that were never executed.

He spends more time worrying that members of his ragtag entourage will turn him in to collect a bounty offered by the governor of Missouri (a scene-stealing cameo by James Carville).

Rubbing out several of his confederates, Jesse gives insufficient thought to the sycophantic Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), a stuttering 19-year-old fan of dime novels about Jesse’s exploits who has entered the gang on the coattails of his morose older brother Charley (Sam Rockwell).

Amid more pregnant pauses than a season’s worth of Pinter and visuals practically plagiarized from Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” Aussie director Andrew Dominik (“Chopper”) offers a variety of explanations for the titular act, which finally occurs 132 long minutes into the movie.

Besides the reward, self-preservation and jealousy of Jesse’s celebrity, the flick rather heavy-handedly suggests Bob Ford had unresolved homoerotic issues.

This is most hilariously spelled out in a scene where Bob tries to engage a distracted Jesse, who’s taking a bath, in a conversation about their being the “same size.”

This artsy adaptation of Ron Hansen’s 1982 book, which further obscures things with hard-to-follow accents, doesn’t pick up even a little momentum until after Bob shoots Jesse in the back.

The final half-hour is essentially a lengthy coda devoted to Bob’s life afterward, which began with 15 minutes of fame as he and his brother re-enacted the assassination in a traveling stage show.

Charley takes his own life, while Bob endures a famous ballad about “that dirty little coward” (performed on-screen by Nick Cave) before being shot to death by another fame-seeker.

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” has been on the shelf for a year, with Warner Bros. reportedly testing as many as half a dozen different cuts to indifferent audience response.

Even Pitt’s head-scratching best actor award at the Venice Film Festival (he basically plays Jesse as an attitudinized version of himself in a fashion layout) isn’t going to help much.

The events here were far more entertainingly covered by Sam Fuller in his directing debut, “I Shot Jesse James,” recently released on DVD – and it’s half as long, to boot.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

* 1/2

They shoulda shot the director instead.

Running time: 160 minutes. Rated R (violence, sexuality). At the Lincoln Square and the Angelika.