Nominative determinism is the idea that people will act a certain way if named so; Sigmund Freud investigated happiness in people whose surnames meant “joy” and Jerry Seinfeld once famously encountered a library detective named Lt. Bookman. In cinema, it’s often courted. James Cameron was begging destiny to destroy him when he made “Titanic” but thankfully, he avoided the titular ship’s fate by crafting cinema’s last true epic; alas, relative newcomer Cheng Er’s third feature, “The Wasted Times” does exactly what it says on the tin.

Ge You plays the shady Mr. Lu, a crime boss in Shanghai during World War II. In the midst of Japanese aggression, he’s broached by a pair of quote-unquote businessmen who offer him a partnership in a bank of sorts: they supply money from Japan and he supplies contacts in China who could do with some off-the-books funding while the world’s attention is aimed on larger matters. To help, he enlists Watabe, an ethnically Japanese citizen who has lived in Shanghai all his life and, as seen by the way he is treated early in the movie, has paid for it all his life too.

This first section of “The Wasted Times” which lasts for roughly 40 of the film’s 123 minute duration is a fantastic slow burn. With a meticulous directing style that is just on the right side of airless, Er makes Shanghai of the late 1930s look like a maze that his characters can barely navigate. By keeping his camera completely horizontal and only moving it when necessary, and having his actors remain as close to being a blank canvas as possible, his directorial style is like an extreme version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s minimal style - Er’s use of jump cuts reveals his debt to the French New Wave overall - and it’s cool enough to cover the cracks that quickly emerge in his screenplay.

Upon cutting at an auspicious moment during a gunfight, the film enters a protracted flashback and this is where “The Wasted Times” falls apart. Even though the possibilities to explain the end of part one are squarely limited to a simple question of wondering whose side Watabe is really on, almost an hour is dedicated to laying the groundwork for what was just shown. In this segment, the backstory to Zhang Ziyi’s character Xiao Lu and how she is involved with everybody else. It plays out almost like a prequel to itself and, just as the plot about her life as an aspiring actress seems like it will get too cute, Er breaks the fourth wall (or something like it) and has he describe the film-within-a-film that she’s starring in as being an art film, so it doesn’t need to make sense.

Rarely do filmmakers’s voice their intentions so clearly and brazenly. It isn’t a bluff or a misreading either as, once that segment ends, the finale ignores all the structure so far and moves ahead of the first segment to 1945, yet still crams in another huge plot divergence via a combination of flashbacks and montages in ways that barely work on an intellectual level and confound on an emotional one. Tadanobu Asano, who plays Watabe, has always been an excellent screen presence but what’s often forgotten is that he’s the rare type of fearless actor willing to commit heinous acts without any kind of metatextual recompense; he’s no anti-hero or flawed villain in “The Wasted Times”, he’s just a complete heel and his screen partnership with Ziyi in this final chunk is grippingly lurid, even when the actual finale finally arrives and proves the film to be completely hollow.

Fantastic ensemble performances, assured direction and a commitment - misplaced or otherwise - to the crime genre all add up to nothing, and unlike the lesser films of Nicolas Winding Refn, it doesn’t even wait until the climax to give up the ghost. There’s potential in Cheng Er, but until he can find a way to use it, he’ll waste it and everyone involved.