Though it offers only a few smiles, Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson's British import St. Trinian's, the sixth film to date adapted from Ron Searle's classic cartoon drawing series, is being billed as a farce. Buried under a deluge of rousing bad-girls-are-better rhetoric and an overwhelming sense of aimless chaos -- though neither the fun nor the existential kind -- the film, a monster hit in England, targets the same sort of rigid, classical attitude to modern education that was so refreshingly and insightfully critiqued in Laurent Cantet's The Class. But unfortunately, St. Trinian's wants to do little more than stick out its tongue at the conservative lot.

The same can be said about the film's attitude towards narrative structure. Again, this might have resulted in something interesting -- but the neglect here is more the result of laziness rather than a spirit of irreverence. Trinian's purposefully hits a rote opening note: young Annabelle Fritton (Talulah Riley) is marched into the not-so-hallowed halls of the titular all-girls boarding school by her father Carnaby (Rupert Everett with a silver mane) only to find the school secretary passed out at the desk. Coming down from K can be some nasty business, apparently. Carnaby has arrived to pass his daughter off onto his twin sister Camilla (Everett again, this time in drag), the head mistress at Trinian's. Carnaby leaves and, quite suddenly, the school reveals itself as a gang's lair; the headquarters for the largest adolescent crime syndicate in all of England.

Camilla runs the school, but the girls -- separated into Geeks, Goths, First Years, Chavs, and Posh Totties -- fall under the leadership of "head girl" Kelly (Gemma Arterton in her pre-007 debut), a scheming knock-out with a cropped 'do. To balance the story (unsuccessfully), Parker and Thompson introduce an enemy: new Minister of Education and Camilla's ex-flame Geoffrey Thwaites (Colin Firth, slumming hard but having fun), a stiff media hound who wants to shut down Trinian's. Coupled with a half-million dollar debt, the school decides to do the only logical thing a network of teenage thieves, sluts, and other criminals could do: Steal Vermeer's "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" and secretly sell it to Carnaby with the help of criminal mastermind Flash (Russell Brand, wearing out any welcome Forgetting Sarah Marshall might have invited).

The talented cast makes you hope, at the very least, that Trinian's would opt for comforting mediocrity, but the film instead achieves aggravatingly levels of pointlessness. It dares to talk about boarding-school girls sleeping with the royal family and features (gasp!) a man dressed as a woman, but anyone who has bought a ticket to an R-rated movie before will find Parker and Thompson's attempts at transgression insufferable.

One of the directors, Oliver Parker, has done some charming stuff with Rupert Everett before, including the funny 2002 rehashing of The Importance of Being Earnest with Firth and Reese Witherspoon. That was a classic tale of calamity and chaos done-up for the date-night crowd but with a semblance of character and urgency, neither of which is in evidence here. In its send-up of the let's-save-the-rec-center high school comedy, St. Trinian's might believe that it has it over on the cliches of Hollywood. But with its crass indifference to storytelling, craft and originality, it could easily be mistaken for faceless studio product.