With Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, and Wim Wenders' new The End Of Violence, the L.A.-As-Microcosm film has become something of a '90s mini-genre. In Violence, Bill Pullman plays a producer of action films whose encounter with real-life violence changes his life (not unlike Steve Martin's character in Grand Canyon, coincidentally). After escaping a kidnap attempt, due to his having received a top-secret document from surveillance expert Gabriel Byrne, Pullman is forced to go underground and receive spiritual rejuvenation in the company of some salt-of-the-earth Latin Americans. Though a cliché, it's unfortunate that this process, like several other major character changes, takes place off-screen, making an already unwieldy movie seem shallow to boot. That's a real problem, too, especially when a movie takes on as big a topic as violence in its many incarnations. Instead of coming off as profound—and anyone who has seen Wenders at his best knows he can be profound—The End Of Violence just seems naive. Which is not to say it's not interesting. It's a Wenders film, which means it's long, detailed, thoughtful, beautifully filmed, digressive and—less here than in some of his other work—smart. Unfortunately, even at its best it seems like an emotionally distant reworking of Wenders' familiar themes of technology, personal relationships, and the elaborate connections between apparently unrelated individuals. In other words, even at its best, it seems pretty close to pointless. And anyone who can figure out what's going on in the final confrontation between Pullman and wife Andie MacDowell—or why this is the second film this year to feature a mysterious cameo by 185-year-old director Sam Fuller—should get a free admission.