On paper, it sounds juicy: “An ambitious lawyer (Josh Duhamel) finds himself caught in a power struggle between a corrupt pharmaceutical executive (Anthony Hopkins) and his firm’s senior partner (Al Pacino). When the case takes a deadly turn, he must race to uncover the truth before he loses everything.”

So reads the single-page handout for “Misconduct” that was distributed to reviewers in lieu of production notes. This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it. As for Mr. Duhamel, this human vanilla milkshake seems totally lost in a movie that requires him to be more than a generic nice guy with a pretty face.

“Misconduct” is the directorial debut of Shintaro Shimosawa, the producer of “The Grudge” and “The Grudge 2,” from a screenplay by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason, a filmmaking team behind low-budget horror movies of which you’ve probably never heard. It begins as a whistle-blower drama about a young lawyer determined to expose and prosecute the crimes of Mr. Hopkins’s evil plutocrat.

From there it goes haywire and becomes a laughably inept, crazily edited, incomprehensible, suspense-free thriller, one of whose villains repeatedly runs people down with a motorcycle. Malin Akerman, as the plutocrat’s scheming girlfriend, wildly overacts the role of a film noir temptress. Alice Eve plays the lawyer’s depressed wife as a pouting, one-note baby doll.