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There's a scene from the movie Three Kings that has always stuck with me. In it, a CNN reporter is touring Iraq in the days following the '91 gulf war. The Humvee she's riding in breaks down and she's stranded at a shattered petroleum facility, overlooking a flock of birds covered in oil. They flap, dying, squawking piteously. She stares, and sinks to the ground, overcome. "It's... It's all so goddamn horrible," she breathes.

That's what watching the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice feels like. It is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of Jane Austen adaptations. It's a painful abomination. My soul weeps, and yours should, too.

Before going any further, I want to establish my credibility as someone who actually enjoys Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility was one of my favorite films growing up -- that, and Remains of the Day. I was an odd kid. When I finally saw the BBC miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I was really blown away. Great acting, awesome script, an all-around class act. Colin Firth set the bar very, very high for future Mister Darcys. I've watched and enjoyed Clueless and Bride And Prejudice, too, so you can't say that I'm averse to creative reinterperetations of the source material. I even saw the low budget Bollywood zany-fest, I Have Found It, with its deep veins of inexplicable cultural context and baffling metaphor.

At the most superficial level, the makers of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice have obviously lavished attention on the sets, on the costumes, on capturing certain curious and cool nuances of architecture and decor and fashion. A few scenes -- Mister Bingley obsessing to Mister Darcy over his proposal to Jane -- are cute. It hits all the key plot points, and the scenery is quite pretty when it's not wrapped in an inexplicable Sleepy Hollow Fog.

In almost every other way, though, the story has been sucked dry by bad acting, a bad script, and just plain bad casting. Kiera Knightly, for example, makes a fine soccer-playing tomboy in Bend it Like Beckham. In Jane Austen's day, though, her skinny physique would be cause for immediate medical intervention and open pity, not a cover shoot for Elle.

That's unfortunate but forgivable -- unlike the film's constant mangling of characters. The absurd, fawning Mister Collins of the book is a stiff, vaguely creepy weirdo. Mister Bennet's a hust of himself here, shuffling from scene to scene with a stricken look, muttering his lines and looking like he'd much rather be Gandalf. His isn't the fretting mother hen from the book. Instead. She's a genuinely panicked woman lost in her world of matchmaking. Mister Bingley? A fish-eyed weirdo. Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed, but the role was played so well in the BBC version. There, Bingley was a good-humored extrovert, not a staring oggler. It made sense that Jane would enjoy his company, not just the promise of his fortune. The common thread in all of these bad bits of acting is their weighty seriousness. Jane Austen wrote snappy, witty stuff. Her characters were funny -- not because they cracked jokes but because they were comical charicatures. That's gone from this film, replaced by heavy gothic seriousness.

Talk of characters, naturally, brings us to Mister Darcy. Colin Firth's job was incredible in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. He had a tough job -- play a proud, arrogant man who dislikes interacting with others, but make us like him. He captured the vibe of an upper-crust guy who's still uncomfortable in his own skin, annoyed by social demands, and distant -- even antagonistic -- with strangers. When we saw him in a new context -- on his own turf, riding around his home or taking care of his sister -- the differences felt natural, they made sense. The New And Improved Darcy is just a stony-faced cipher, blank outside and empty inside. When his 'transformation' comes, it's an inexplicable shift from stiff-to-jovial. It's as if the entire film is populated by actors incapable of capturing more than one emotion at a time. The cast is not thread-safe.

Key conversations are rendered baffling by backported 20th-century worldviews, like Charlotte's angry defensiveness when Lizzie protests her loveless marriage to Mister Collins. "Don't judge me," she hisses. "Don't you dare judge me!" Er. Okay? The book's Charlotte was no romantic, and she told Lizzie as much, but the conversation was about reassuring Lizzie she would be happy, not asserting some personal moral independence. Often, the film tries to bludgeon the viewer with over-wrought class-and-manners moments. Extreme closeups on disapproving looks from rich neighbors with loooooooong stretches of silence to remind us Just How Scandalous some random gaffe is. Moments later, though, an upper-class man walks into a woman's bedchamber just to say "Hi" and no one thinks anything of it. Hello, inappropriate.

The film's sins keep piling up. I could go on and on, but I'll just leave it at this: The 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice is a humorless ride through drama-ville. Stick with the BBC version. It's longer, but more than worth it: it captures the wit and humor of Austen's writing, not just the plot points.