Nolan Hemmings, a son of the British actor David Hemmings, was last seen playing his father as a young man in ''Last Orders,'' the 2002 film with Michael Caine about a band of aging Englishmen on a journey to scatter the ashes of an old friend. Now the young Mr. Hemmings has the unenviable assignment of holding down the lead in ''The Petersburg-Cannes Express,'' a film of outstanding dullness and ineptitude that opened in New York on Friday.

The producers released the film without showing it in advance to journalists, and it doesn't take long to discover why. Though written and directed by an Englishman, John Daly, a producer who was once the head of Britain's Hemdale Pictures, the film has been cast with many Russian actors in important roles, none of whom seem able to speak even the very basic English in which their lines have been written. Compounding matters, Mr. Daly seems to lack even a rudimentary ability to pose performers naturally in front of a camera; all those in St. Petersburg look embarrassed and uncertain, as if they have no idea what was being said to them, either.