What is it about India and Westerners, anyway? An extended visit to India rates right up there with “backpacking across Europe” as the number one brag for people aged 20-25 in the United States. And if you’ve ever been trapped in a room with someone who’s just been backpacking across Europe, you know that boast gets very old, very fast. India, at least, is just different enough to be almost alien. And the right people visiting the right locations under the right circumstances can produce something truly great; just look at The White Album.

This is what Francis (Owen Wilson), the eldest of three brothers, has in mind for himself and his clan. The brothers haven’t spoken in the year since their father’s funeral, and Francis figures a trip on the Darjeeling Limited through India is just what they need to heal. His brothers Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) wear their wounds in soulful stares and muted words; only Francis, the least self-aware of the bunch, wears his bandaging on the outside. Somewhere at the end of their journey waits their estranged mother Patricia (Anjelica Huston), a woman less than thrilled with the idea of a family reunion.

So, yes, it’s a Wes Anderson film about a dysfunctional family of wealthy misfits trying to reconcile. Surprise! Why the three brothers are so distant from one another, and why their mother prefers to stay out of the lives of all of them, is left largely unspecified; broad and opaque references to wounds and grievances past are evidently meant to show and not tell, but in reality all that vagueness reads as flimsiness. It’s the journey that’s meant to make the movie, anyway, not the catalyst.

It’s too bad there isn’t much to the journey. Jack and Peter enact small mutinies under the ham-fisted rule of Francis, Jack courts a fetching stewardess (Amara Karan) to heal the wounds from his last relationship, and various pairs of the boys conspire to keep secrets from the third. They swap prescription drugs. They annoy the Darjeeling Limited’s porter. Eventually they meet their mother.

But it never adds up to much. The humor is slight, and some of the best lines are flushed through simple poor delivery – witness the line in the trailer about “the train getting lost,” something potentially very funny, and watch it lay there on the screen. Running gags and recurring dialogue refuse to die, like an eager puppy with just the one trick it needs to show you again and again. The two extended dramatic sequences would carry more dramatic weight if they were allowed to stand alone; sandwiched as they are by flimsy comedy, they simply fall flat. By the end we’re expected to believe the Darjeeling Limited represents every obstacle in the lives of the three brothers, rather than what it is: the claustrophobic set of Wes Anderson’s weakest comedy yet. Rushmore this train ain’t.

What blame doesn’t lie with the paper-thin script (by Anderson, Schwartzman, and Roman Coppola) can be laid at the feet of the cast. Schwartzman in particular is an actor with incredibly limited range, and here he seems to think a mustache and long pauses equal gravitas. Wilson and Brody are stronger actors who turn in better performances, but to what end? We learn nothing about these characters we couldn’t have guessed within 10 minutes of the opening credits. Worse, no one seems to believe in anything that’s going on, least of all the people behind the camera. It’s hard to give a damn when there’s nothing worth giving a damn about.