Hilary Swank is a great actress; her affecting performances in Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby both garnered her Academy Awards, while her co-star in Amelia, Richard Gere, won a Golden Globe for Chicago and is a thoroughly charming heartthrob-type. Despite this concoction, and Oscar-winning screenwriter (for Rain Man) Ron Bass penning the film, Amelia is a painfully routine and dull biopic that leisurely strolls through a remarkable woman’s achievements without any flair or enthusiasm. Amelia is worse than a bad film: it is a disappointingly mediocre one.

And it is not the fault of the actors or the directors; Bass takes the sole blame in failing to come up with an interesting look at Amelia Earhart’s life, and given that she was the first prominent female pilot and a huge icon for feminism, it is quite embarrassing for Bass that this happened. This is pure biopic formula, carefully travelling through Earhart’s life with training wheels on, sure not to offend anyone and doubly sure not to allow the actors any room with which to express themselves. Although Swank and Gere are appealing, the slapdash script never ignites their chemistry as a couple, nor does it allow them to shine individually.

The film begins promisingly enough, though, with Earhart (Swank) meeting a publishing tycoon named George Putnam (Richard Gere), who quite honestly outlines the superficiality of his business, allowing Earhart the ability to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, as long as she is only a passenger, which Earhart is obviously none too fond of. Putnam plays a great PR game, and although she may not like his methods, he gains her considerable fame, which ultimately allows her to be the pilot that she wants to be, right down to her mysterious disappearance during her attempt to fly around the circumference of the world.

Indeed, there are some interesting flashes sprinkled throughout Amelia; when Earhart marries Putnam, for instance, she attests that she will love and honour her husband, but not obey him, but largely the film just lacks character, and feels far too packaged, and dare I say, Oscar baiting to resonate as convincing or genuine drama. It’s a real shame, because the shell to this film is rather enticing: Mira Nair’s direction features some gorgeous flight shots, and the production design is quite immaculate, with the costume department quite probably being nominated for an Oscar.

Swank and even possibly Gere, however, are cheated out of any sort of Oscar chances because of the down-right boring script; Swank is a hoot with the accent, the freckled appearance and the wacky hairstyle, but Bass never grants her the necessary space to inhabit her character, resulting in a profound lack of depth, making this Earhart appear quite aloof and wooden. The script works a little better in Gere’s favour, allowing him a certain slyness that is no doubt attuned to his natural character and cultural representation, but again, there’s just not enough to make these people seem alive.

This film is formulaic not only through being clean and cheerful like a television-produced biography, but also for the casual manner in which it blasts through Earhart’s myriad achievements, beginning with a flight and then plastering a number of newspaper headlines that move off of the screen so fast that there’s no time to read them. Every so often something with promise will happen, such as when she meets Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), an aviation administrator with whom she has an affair, but it’s always dealt with in the most procedural, snooze-inducingly simple way possible. Even the film’s climax, in which Amelia disappears, inspires its audience to feel little; she and radio control mishear each other a few times and poof – she’s gone – and the audience is sadly never really asked to care.

Lacking sorely in not only the rich socio-political context of the time, but any probing insight into the woman herself, Amelia is a vapid shell and vastly underwhelming biopic that features great actors and a supposedly great screenwriter, but can’t wrangle an interesting film out of it. One would expect a film like this to write itself, but sadly it hasn’t, and Swank and Gere are left in the wilderness to try and work things out themselves; they leave unscathed, and in fact Nair does well with some gorgeous sweeping shots of the planes, but Bass is a total bust, and phones in a lazy, studio-friendly effort here. If you’re marking your Oscar ballots, you’ll want to mostly rub this one off for the most part.