Johnny Depp, playing a dying scientist, has his brain uploaded to mind-numbing effect in Transcendence where nothing happens that you havent seen done much better in almost any computer-oriented sci-fi epic of the last six decades.

Lethargic direction, bland visuals, credulity-straining plotting and tin-eared dialogue turn even pros like Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman into sleepwalking bores.

Things start off on a promising note, with a shot of a computer keyboard being used as a doorstop. The Web has crashed and cant be fixed.

Bettany tells us exactly how that happened in droning narration thats going to explain Every. Last. Thing. (Except why the Web cant be fixed.)

Hall plays Depps wife and professional collaborator hes the worlds leading expert on artificial intelligence.

When he suffers a lethal encounter with cyber-terrorists, she urges him to let her use his remaining month of life to basically upload his genius to a Web cloud so he can continue his work.

I havent given away anything that isnt apparent from the trailer. But now I need to get into spoilerish territory to do a proper demolition job on this fiasco.

Depps former associates, Bettany and Freeman, come to question whether its really a resurrected Depp they hear through computer speakers and see on monitors, or just a computer program with evil intent mimicking him.

But Hall insists that the digitized version of her formerly modest husband is real and not Memorex even when he begins laying plans to control the world.

Its not a horrible premise for a movie, but the execution is exceedingly trite and sloppy.

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Depp cant transcend artificial stupidity in latest film