Simply put, “Michael Clayton” is the most boring, rehashed legal thriller to come out in the last 200 years. In fact, the only interesting thing about it is wondering how it even got made.

“Michael Clayton” is the directorial debut of writer turned writer-director Tony Gilroy, whose previous work includes scripting the three blockbusters that are the Jason Bourne trilogy. With “Bourne,” somebody else already wrote the books and Gilroy just had to put in scene numbers and change the font to Courier. It seems like Gilroy used his presence among Hollywood royalty to push a wholly halfhearted script through the system, fueling it only by empty promises to give audiences something great.

Sure, an A-list star like George Clooney seems like all you need for a one-dimensional character study like this, but despite his presence, “Michael Clayton” falls very flat.

The film centers around the title character, a major legal clean-up man who tries in vain to rein in the brilliant-but-bipolar lawyer of one of their firm’s largest cases (involving a toxic pesticide made by huge but oh-so-corrupt corporate entity Unorth). After the brilliant lawyer, played fairly well by Tom Wilkinson, falls apart upon discovering incriminating Unorth documents, Clayton is forced to bring the truth to the people.

And that’s it.

Two stupid sentences, and there’s the whole movie laid out for you. Of course, there are the token character complexities—early in the film, we learn of Clayton’s large negative-number bank statement as a major point of character motivation. But—twist ending alert!—Clayton refuses to sell out all those poor farmers that had their babies’ faces melted off with Unorth poison. No way…he just uses the company’s offer to bust ’em.

The movie includes a bunch of other generic struggles for its leading man, like a drug addict brother, a past-tense marriage and a failed Italian restaurant, all of which are dealt with in a hasty and utterly unattached fashion. Long, driving sequences periodically punctuate the mundane heart rate of the film while Clooney works his way through the film’s children’s maze of a plot. And though the camera work is often pleasant, the movie has little else to offer.

The problem with the film is that it is an obvious, pedestrian story filled out by mostly mediocre performances. Its concept is not original. It is not innovative. It’s just a trite rearrangement of thirty other movies with a good-looking older man starring in it. Don’t bother seeing this poor excuse for a movie.