Here's a no-fail equation: Julie Taymor -- the creative genius behind Broadway's "The Lion King," the visionary director of "Frida" and "Titus" -- plus the music of the Beatles -- who need no introduction -- equals: something great, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh, how very wrong. "Across the Universe," in which Taymor shoehorns, contorts and otherwise bullies some of the Fab Four's greatest hits into a vapid Hollywood musical, is the kind of project that must have looked great on paper. On screen, eh, not so much.

Evan Rachel Wood plays Lucy, an innocent high school kid in the early 1960s; Jim Sturgess plays Jude, a Liverpool lad who has just arrived in America and has befriended Lucy's brother, Max (Joe Anderson). The three friends wind up in Greenwich Village at the height of the era's cultural and political upheaval, occasionally breaking into song -- with their friends Sadie, Prudence, Jo-Jo, you get the idea -- and even dancing now and then.

Viewers expecting "Across the Universe" to evince Taymor's vaunted visual imagination will be sorely disappointed by a production that is bizarrely flat; the most memorable production number is set to "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" at a draft induction center, a set piece inspired by Fritz Lang and Joseph Cornell.

Aside from such rare and fleeting bursts of energy, "Across the Universe" is a yawn and most unforgivably features some appalling arrangements of the Beatles' best-loved songs, the schmaltzy orchestrations of which echo the ersatz happenings on the screen. Another line would have provided a more apt title: Nothing is real.

-- Ann Hornaday (Sept. 14, 2007)