Bill Murray carries the movie for the first third. He's funny. He has a great sense of comic timing. Scarlett Johansson is good in her role, too.

But after about a third of the movie, the problem, for me, was that I just couldn't care what happened to the characters. Their portrayal gets shallower rather than deeper as the movie goes on. The dialog isn't wooden so much as just shallow and trite. The peripheral characters are all handled in hackneyed ways -- like Murray's wife caring only about redecorating the house, Johansson's husband in too-cool on-the-make mode.

Tokyo was fun to look at, but you see it only through tourist's eyes. While that's appropriate to the story, it's inherently shallow, too. For a far superior look at Japan through American eyes, take a look at the 1975 Robert Mitchum film, The Yakuza.

I gave Lost in Translation a 4/10.