Michael Caine and Demi Moore in a diamond-stealing caper,"Flawless," directed by Michael Radford.

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"Flawless" never begins to live up to its title.

The movie, opening in Tucson Friday and available June 3 on DVD, has three virtues: a graceful minimalist performance by Michael Caine as a canny custodian, a quiet turn by Lambert Wilson as a man investigating a theft of diamonds, and one plot twist in the middle that left me scratching my head with pleasure. The rest of the film is banal or bogus.

After a modern-day prologue, in which 86-year-old Laura Quinn meets a reporter to tell her remarkable tale, we flash immediately back to 1960, when Laura (Demi Moore) works at the monolithic London Diamond Corp. Although she's the top-ranking female executive in the business, successfully negotiating a long-term contract with the Soviets, she finds a secret letter saying she's about to be fired — apparently because she's a woman, though that's not clear.

Janitor Hobbs (Caine) approaches her with a proposition: If she'll sneak the codes to the LDC vault away from the head of the company (Joss Ackland), he'll go in and come out with a thermos full of sparklers that they'll split 50-50 — and no one will be the wiser for a long while. When she complies, he changes the plan without consulting her.

The mechanics of the plot prove to be impossible when revealed, and the climax actually made me laugh aloud. The sloppy sentimental finale suits neither the tone of the rest of the film nor reality as we know it.

Moore has become a cold, stolid actress; any time the frame encompasses two people, the eye wanders from her to Caine or Wilson, who's playing a rare sympathetic role. (The French actor is usually cast as a creep, such as the Merovingian in the "Matrix" series.) Moore's character is described as an American raised in the United States, yet she has a faux-British accent that seems to choke off expressivity.

Worst of all, director Michael Radford and writer Edward Anderson imbue the Eisenhower era with a modern sensibility.

People protest "blood diamonds" in the street outside LDC headquarters; Ackland's character frets about public perception of apartheid in South Africa, with whom the firm does business; the British press all but break down a door to get a story.

This is the same British press that, in real life, quietly agreed to suppress a damaging story about the royal family in 1971. Radford was a teenager in 1960; he should know better, even if amnesiac audiences might not.