One always has to question a great director’s decision to remake another great director’s film, but the prospect of Zhang Yimou doing an Eastern take on the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple seemed irresistible as a floated idea. Zhang is not known for playful genre bending outside of his rightfully heralded martial-arts extravaganzas (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), and it’s refreshing to see another country remake our pictures for a change, since we steal like bandits from them.

Unfortunately, despite Zhang’s always-arresting mise en scene and some jaunty sequences, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop ends up as generic as its title. It retains the basic outline of Simple: an unhappy woman (Yan Ni) takes up with a lover (Xiao Shenyang), while under the watchful eye of her skanky husband, who has designs on ruining the couple. Enter patrol officer Zhang (Sun Hunglei), the wicked villain who throws the designed scheme out of whack when he involves his own agenda.

The chief problem with this retelling is that the Coens were already goofing on a well-established genre--the film noir--which has a built-in cheek factor, so they weren’t remaking it so much as reintroducing it, albeit with their own acidic, devilishly clever twists. Zhang’s film substitutes slam-bang for smirk, with a particularly deafening sound design which is so prominent it may as well be a character in the film, and the result is surprisingly leaden once the bloom is off. After some strong early scenes (a trip through noodle-making in the film’s chief restaurant locale is a dazzler), the film’s mood turns from slapstick to earnest suspense, a move even the greatest filmmakers have trouble facilitating, and Zhang proves no exception here.

The exaggerated acting is also a debit. Seriously, is this noir or Jerry Lewis? If one more person fell for comic effect, this reviewer was going to call Workers’ Comp. However, Sun Hunglei’s hangdog visage is used to maximum effect, and he is the one actor who doesn’t mug his way through the thing. Some are undoubtedly going to go for Noodle Shop’s stylized bravado (it plays more like a midnight movie than anything else in Zhang’s career), but if you can recall Zhang’s masterful backlog of beauties (with beauty-of-all-time Gong Li), this one seems like diddling by comparison.

Sum…ology: Pretty and occasionally lively, but a wet Noodle.