Hilary Swank plays pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart in the biopic Amelia. (Ken Woroner/Fox Searchlight)

By rights, Amelia Earhart ought to be remembered for her achievements as an aviatrix and as an icon of female derring-do. Instead, her name is synonymous with one of the 20th-century’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

Hilary Swank, who was emotionally devastating as the real-life Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry, can’t seem to break the surface of the far more famous Amelia Earhart.

In 1937, during the final stages of an attempt to circle the Earth, pilot Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished somewhere near Howland Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whether Earhart crashed her Lockheed Electra in the ocean or on a nearby atoll has never been determined. Theories about her disappearance have inspired everything from nutty books like Amelia Earhart Lives (which claimed she was a spy captured by the Japanese) to facetious Family Guy skits.

The best thing that can be said about the new biopic Amelia is that it restores some balance to the Earhart saga, faithfully charting her triumphs before dwelling on that fateful final flight. In other respects, though, this movie is a dud. Hilary Swank may look the spitting image of Earhart in those vintage newsreels, but her performance is more insipid than inspiring. Mira Nair directs as if she were piloting an overloaded plane on an endless runway — the film lumbers along interminably, never achieving takeoff.

It’s not clear why it goes off-course. Swank, who was emotionally devastating as the real-life Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry, can’t seem to break the surface of the far more famous Earhart. (Heck, Swank was more affecting in the dopey P.S. I Love You.) Her one-note Amelia is all sunny, freckled optimism, a plucky Kansas tomboy uttering empty maxims about flying “for the fun of it” and not letting anyone “turn you around.” Only in her occasional voice-over narration, drawn from Earhart’s writings, do we get a brief glimpse of the soul beneath the slogans.

The gifted Nair is just as disappointing. If her name weren’t in the credits, you’d never know she was at the wheel of this clunker. Her best films (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding) are richly chaotic, juicy with life. This picture is staid and lifeless, lacking passion both in its depiction of Earhart’s aerial feats and in her romantic entanglements on the ground.

Seasoned screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan skip Earhart’s formative years to focus on her rise to fame and her relationship with publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere), her promoter-turned-husband. Gere’s dapper, gently cynical Putnam first contacts Amelia in 1928 to participate in a publicity stunt: he wants her to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, an event he’ll capitalize on by publishing her account of the trip. Amelia balks when she learns she’ll only be a passenger on the male-piloted flight, but then agrees and proves her mettle as a backseat driver.

Promoter-turned-husband George Putnam (Richard Gere, right) concentrates on marketing Amelia Earhart to the public. (Ken Woroner/Fox Searchlight)

From there, Putnam genially exploits the novelty of his female flyer, sending her out on the lecture circuit when she isn’t plugging her own line of clothing, luggage, even waffle irons. Amelia goes along with it all in return for the chance to popularize flying among young women and continue her own endeavours.

These episodes are dutifully but dully recorded. I’ve never seen a movie about the thrill of air travel that was less thrilling. Amelia’s perilous solo transatlantic flight in 1932 — only the second of its kind after Lindbergh’s — becomes a bland jaunt barely enlivened by a colourful thunderstorm. For the landmark all-female air race across the U.S. in 1929 — the original “powder puff derby” — Nair relies on bits of archival footage instead of a full-out re-creation.

The film is more preoccupied with constructing a rickety love triangle between Amelia, the older Putnam (whom she marries in 1931) and his younger rival, Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor). Gene’s a West Point aviation instructor with a sweet little son named Gore Vidal (William Cuddy as the far-from-sweet author). McGregor’s Gene is a suave nonentity; we’re not sure what Amelia sees in him, or vice versa. Then again, there isn’t much going on between Swank’s Amelia and Gere’s Putnam, either. Gere makes a heroic effort to convince us of the publisher’s undying love for his free-spirited wife, but Swank scarcely reciprocates.

There’s a scene where Gene remarks that Amelia notices beautiful women more than other women do — a suggestion that maybe our heroine’s true inclinations lie elsewhere. But this timid movie never goes any further. I bet if the grownup Gore Vidal, who wrote the transgender classic Myra Breckinridge, had been involved in the screenplay, he wouldn’t have fudged Earhart’s lesbian appeal. Or at the very least, he would have placed more emphasis on her women friends and colleagues. The only woman Amelia bonds with is Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones), and in that case, Amelia has an ulterior motive — she wants Gene to be appointed head of the government’s aeronautics branch.

Just when we’ve lost all hope of getting involved emotionally or viscerally, the film picks up speed in its final minutes. Nair has threaded scenes from Amelia and Noonan’s (Christopher Eccleston) round-the-globe flight throughout the story and when it reaches its last leg — the doomed journey to Howland Island — there’s some genuine tension. Finally, we get a palpable sense of the wild risks taken by the early pioneers of aviation.

It’s too little, too late. As the film limps to a close, Amelia has accomplished a feat we didn’t think possible: it has made us indifferent to this real-life heroine’s tragic fate.

Amelia opens Oct. 23.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.