That's right — more than two months after its New York debut, I have finally gotten around to seeing Boogie Nights. Don't ask me why it took so long for me to catch up with one of the most critically adored of all 1997 movies. It seems that I always had a time conflict, or that I just wasn't in the mood. Finally, I bought my ticket out of a sense of duty as much as anything. And this just proves that sometimes it's best to trust your instincts — seldom have I taken such an active dislike to a widely acclaimed picture.

The first thing you notice is that writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose sophomore effort this is, is anxious to get your attention. Thus he inserts an uncommon stretch of blank film after the brief flash of the New Line Cinema logo. This uncomfortable silence is finally broken when the film's title crashes onto the screen in pink and purple neon. Figuring the way to our hearts is through our memories of great films, Anderson then models the remainder of his picture on Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas, first portraying the free-wheeling good times of a "family" of characters with "alternative" moral structures and then chronicling their bload-soaked comeuppance in the final reels.

If Boogie Nights apes Scorsese, it follows in the footsteps of Tarantino, whose infinitely superior Pulp Fiction made eccentric gutter characters glamorous again. Instead of small-time hoods and/or boxers, the characters in Boogie Nights are makers of dirty movies, led by gentleman pornographer Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds, in the role of a lifetime). Across a crowded nightclub, Horner spots Eddie Adams, the fresh-faced, impossibly well-endowed kid who will become Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg). The adult film world is his.

Basically, the first half of the film chronicles Diggler's rise to the top of the porn crop, winning the adult-film equivalent of the Oscar over and over. We get a taste for the quasi-posh lifestyle of Horner, who entertains his cast and crew at poolside like a cut-rate Hugh Hefner. But before we've gotten any sense that these people are having that much of a good time, we've already seen a pretty young blond rupture something in her head by snorting too much coke. Turns out it's just by-the-numbers foreshadowing — Anderson will dole out heaping spoonfuls of violence and degradation for each of his characters, one by one, in the film's drug-addled latter reels.

Many critics have commented on an ostensible lack of sex and nudity, so I was honestly surprised to see as much of that stuff in Boogie Nights as you can get away with in an R-rated picture that's not directed by Peter Greenaway. The single best scene, for my money, is Diggler's first performance for Horner's camera. His screwing of Horner's very willing wife Amber Waves (Julianne Moore, further expanding her increasingly eclectic resume) has a genuinely enticing through-the-looking-glass quality. Elsewhere, there's a full complement of naked or near-naked actresses, a helping of just-off-camera blow jobs, and more than one graphic sex scene — much to the consternation of William H. Macy's flummoxed cuckold, Little Bill.

If anything, there's still not enough sex in the picture for a sense of you-are-there realism. During the film's repeated through-the-viewfinder shots, it's absurd that all of the action is taking place outside of the frame. (The People vs. Larry Flynt suffered from the same problem: it's awkward to make an R-rated film about an X-rated industry.)

Then again, "realism" is far from Anderson's mind. What most surprised me about the film's first half is how utterly lightweight it is. The second half, by contrast, is a morbid downer, doling out gunfire and fistfights in brutal proportions, apparently as payback for any pleasure that might have been experienced early on. Just in case you ever thought that anybody in the porn industry led a truly happy life, Boogie Nights will set you straight — even the suave and stable Horner, who has always deluded himself into thinking that his films have artistic merit, has his spirit utterly crushed by the advent of home video.

The able cast makes some of this seem almost poignant. Stand-outs are Reynolds as the surrogate father figure, Moore as the surrogate mother, and "Rollergirl" Heather Graham as their surrogate daughter. Indeed, Jack Horner's "family" is portrayed as more fully functional than the real families — it's Eddie Addams's mother that drives him to become Dirk Diggler in the first place, and it's Little Bill's wife (played by real-life porn star Nina Hartley) who drives Bill to destruction.

But there's precious little character development, as Anderson never stops trying to impress us with his encyclopedic knowledge of movie gimmickry, or to shock us by splattering his actors with blood and grue. The camera seems never to stop moving, tracking its way not just through a key scene or two, but through every other scene in the damn movie. Scorsese's camera, too, is always moving, but it propels you into and through the action on-screen. By comparison, Anderson's camera grabs you by your shirt and throws you this way and that, finally pushing you up against a wall. All those swish pans get to you after a while, and Boogie Nights seems to have been edited with a joystick. It's enough to leave you breathless, true, but it's not much fun to get jerked around for better than two and a half hours.

Finally, where GoodFellas had reasonably complex characters and some ambiguity about their motives and morals, Boogie Nights has only the most rudimentary trajectory to follow. Once the story turns violent, we start anticipating the gunshots so that we wince before they happen. (By the time a down-and-out Diggler, selling peeks at his dick to other men for $10- and $20-dollar bills, had the living shit beaten out of him by a pickup truck full of gay-baiting rednecks, I was ready to head for the exit.) As if to confound us further, Anderson stages his last set piece in the well-appointed digs of an eccentric wacko, where the crack of firecrackers is a credible prelude to gunfire as awful 80s music swells on the soundtrack. It might have been a pretty good scene, but I had already lost interest. I couldn't have cared less whether anybody got out of that room alive.

Still bereft of fresh ideas, Anderson skewers Scorsese's Raging Bull in the very final scene, but it's still no more than an echo. If Wahlberg summons up nowhere near as many demons as Robert De Niro, it's not necessarily his fault — Boogie Nights has scrambled for 152 long minutes, trying to make up the difference between Dirk Diggler and Jake LaMotta. But you can't draw blood from a turnip, and this screenplay is a pretty dry vegetable. For all its sound and fury, Boogie Nights never finds its own voice.