Recipe for 106 minutes of tedium.

Take an apparently poor adaptation of a Sam Shepard play, add good actors slogging through a weak attempt at complicating a simple plot involving old transgressions and blackmail, mix in a first-time director and then prepare to be bored for precisely 106 minutes.

Actually that's not entirely true. While you spend most of the time watching Simpatico trying not to look at your watch, or wondering why you plunked down good money to see this film, there are moments when you see the elements that might well have worked with different execution coming together. Briefly though. Very briefly.

Jeff Bridges is Carter. Nick Nolte is Vinnie. Sharon Stone is Carter's wife, Rosie. The three share a secret from long ago, when they teamed up to do something horrible to Simms, played by Albert Finney. Years later finds Carter wealthy and successful, Vinnie drinking and living off blackmail he gets from Carter, Rosie living the life of a society matron, and Finney with a new identity to hide the shame of the past.

The only character with any redeeming value is Catherine Keener's Cecilia, a different type of role for her and she does justice to it. Unfortunately, it isn't her picture, but Carter and Vinnie's. For reasons that become clear only towards the very end, Vinnie decides to change the equation with regard to his blackmailing of Carter. He arranges it so that Carter comes to California and winds up trapped there, while Vinnie is off to Kentucky to try to make things happen.

It sounds good on paper but when all is said and done and the few minor twists and turns of the plot have been played, you aren't left with much. Worse yet, the key elements of the long-ago transgressions are shown in intercut flashbacks with much younger actors playing the roles of the key players in the drama. Sometimes that can be done to great effect. This wasn't one of those times.

Simply put, Simpatico isn't.