“WONG KAR-WAI HE’S NOT.” That was my first thought at the beginning of Ang Lee’s current espionage movie “Lust, Caution.” My final thought was, “Whoa, look at all those sexual positions. I’ll have to try some of them with my boyfriend—if he ever comes back from Hawaii.”

To be fair, I wouldn’t say Ang Lee is trying to be Wong Kar-Wai exactly, but when you cast Kar-Wai veteran Tony Leung in moody love scenes set in a China of yesteryear, comparisons will happen. The filmmaking is certainly lush—Hong Kong looks as gorgeous and tempting as those slender women in tight cheong-sams, so often used to evoke a certain atmosphere. Shanghai is shot in shadows, with overcast skies meant to mirror a woman’s own darkening struggle with the twin demons of compromised ideals and carnal desires.

“Lust, Caution” is set during the Second World War in Japanese-occupied China and centers around a beautiful college student named Wong Chia Chi (adroitly played by screen newbie Wei Tang). She’s enlisted at her university to join a political theater troupe and becomes drawn into an idealistic plot to assassinate a traitor, the high-ranking collaborator Mr. Yee. Played by Tony Leung, he is aloof, virile, complicated—cruel at times, but hinting at a certain guarded gentleness, as though he’s just misunderstood by the world. Maybe it’s those hang-dog eyes.

The two have ambition in common. And a taste for danger. Mr. Yee rises in the treacherous puppet government of occupied China to become the powerful secret service minister. Wong Chia Chi transforms herself—from an emotionally adrift girl, orphaned by her mother and abandoned by her father—into Mrs. Mak, a woman sophisticated, savvy, and sensual enough to seduce Shanghai’s most feared official. In the end, her patriotism (her ideologically hatred of Mr. Yee) and her twisted feelings for him conspire to destroy her. I won’t give away the exact ending because you’ll see it coming a mile away.

The movie is billed as a thriller but this overlong 158-minute film has no thrills. Everything that happens, you already saw coming.

To me, the most surprising aspect of the film was how small and monkey-like the usually dashing Tony Leung looked. That, and the sexual coupling of course. All those different and enticing positions, I did not see coming.

Everyone in the movie plays his or her part well. Joan Chen is elegant and understatedly bitchy as Mr. Yee’s wife—she did her best with an underwritten part. Wang Lee-Hom as our heroine’s co-conspirator and fellow resistance fighter is likeable and handsome, showing some nice intensity when he’s allowed to. But Tony Leung and Wei Tang, despite all their sexual activity, didn’t have the kind of chemistry that burns up the screen.

And Ang Lee, a director from whom I’ve come to expect dramatic tension (“The Ice Storm” 1997, “Brokeback Mountain,” 2005, “Eat Drink Man Woman” 1994) and a certain kind of humor (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” 2000, “Sense and Sensibility” 1995) simply did not deliver.

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