In the beginning, no one had high hopes for Brad Pitt beyond being a piece of meat, the perfect model for underwear or aluminum smelling mid-market cologne. His best quality was that he could dash those expectations, nibbling his fingers in “12 Monkeys,” cursing Martha Stewart in “Fight Club” and muttering Pikey in “Snatch.”

You’d think, given the equally complex domestic paranoid Jesse James of Ron Hansen’s novel, who carried a foot-long piece around his house hidden in newspapers and played Ouija board and braided his wife’s hair with flowers and “scraped off his sweat with a knife,” he could beat the time when Johnny Depp reached in the casting hat and got “pirate captain.” Unfortunately, he plays Brad Pitt, a black hole, the opposite of inspired, uncomfortably slouching in a buffalo coat, waiting to be killed.

He seems embarrassed interacting with a cast that easily (even James Carville, yes, the cable news political pundit) outshines him. Casey Affleck, as Robert Ford, is a brilliant mouth-breathing slug. Sam Rockwell, so at home being likeable and gorgeous as in the underrated “Box of Moon Light,” embodies the ugly, dense Ford brother. Sam Shepard, as Frank James, makes Jesse look a sham of a villain. Pitt’s best scene is when he asks for noodles in his soup.

Once the eponymous assassination happens, it’s unnerving to notice how the tone of the movie shifts and tightens. At two hours and 15 minutes, it finally begins to show promise. You start thinking reading Hansen’s book (despite its purple-language-portending use of the word “moat” as a verb, as in “bad luck, which moated and dungeoned him”) would soften your impression.

Pitt doesn’t even seem to have read the voice-over script, which describes him as having an eyelid condition that constantly made him blink and a bad, rheumy cough that never seems to cause him to hack.

Jesse James is missing half a finger; I kept expecting it to — oops — show back up. It’s not all Pitt’s fault that the movie’s about as fun as a can of sifted peas. Half the scenes are irrelevant flab gussied up with gimmicky-looking lens vignette blurs and the overuse of shots through crown glass to make sure we really understand it’s the 19th century. And no movie should have more than one scene of a man sneaking up on another man in a tub.

Remember when Pitt guested on “Friends” and he and Jennifer Aniston were together? Way more fun to watch. Pitt is off his mark until his last minutes in “Jesse James.” He plays Brad Pitt on a day when company is unwelcome, and unfortunately, we are that company.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore.