The folks out at Phase 4 Films sent out a copy of XIII The Conspiracy for us to review, and it’s not a terrible title, but it’s actually pretty dull.

XIII: The Conspiracy follows an amnesiac agent known only–for about the first half of the movie or so–as XIII. And XIII’s up to his eyes in a serious problem, because he’s only recently shot the President, or so the Secret Service believes. And with the world watching just ahead of an election for a new President, the current administration wants a collar, post-haste. As in, “civil rights be damned” post-haste. So the government will crank up the Patriot Act and every trick in its arsenal to find the man responsible. But is XIII actually behind the assassination? And who is XIII really? These questions and so many more will be asked in XIII: The Conspiracy.

It’s only too bad that many of them won’t be answered in any kind of coherent fashion. Seriously, for a movie about the assassination of a sitting President, an action thriller in every sense, this thing is as dull as dishwater. It’s really hard to believe this thing–it just plods along, much as the headline suggests.

It’s a little too dependent on dialogue, and the dialogue is not very well done. The rest of it is an impenetrable morass of implausibility, senselessness, and occasional action scenes.

The worst of it is, XIII: The Conspiracy is trying, so hard, to be worthwhile. It puts out some really nice action sequences, occasionally, like I said, but it just can’t overcome its own handicaps. It keeps getting in its way with plot elements that make no sense at all and a whole lot of dialogue only seldom broken up by anything with a note of excitement.

This thing is a raging snoozefest, plain and simple, and for an action thriller to be neither thrilling nor all that active is frankly inexcusable.

It will start picking up just a bit, toward the end, but considering you had to sit through a way too long hour and forty five minutes to get to the last fifteen minutes that will prove surprisingly good, that still averages out all wrong. Take seven eights bad movie and one eighth good movie and you still get a pretty lousy movie.

In fact, what you get is what the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this sad, lumpy, plodding mess of a movie: a three out of ten. XIII: The Conspiracy just can’t bring the kind of interest required to hold an audience.