Who’d’ve thought, then and now, the key to saving and restoring American Democracy would rest with the US Postal Service?

Back in 1997, “The Postman” – Kevin Costner’s grand American fairytale – seemed like a self-indulgent vanity project for its star/ director.

I mean, who in their right mind would believe a story where 2013 America is laid waste by disease and destitution while a blowhard strongman promises to make the country great again, provided it’s only made great for his supporters while those of undesirable ethnicity are exiled, the infirm and disabled are mocked before being put out of their misery and women are freed from the cruel uncertainty of not knowing their place? Clearly, it’s set three years too early for that to happen.

Following a devastating (but unspecified) cataclysm sixteen years previously, an itinerant drifter (Kevin Costner) wanders from settlement to settlement, trading entertainment for food and shelter. During one performance, he is captured by the Holnists, a neo-fascist racist militia led by General Bethlehem (Will Patton) but manages to escape, fleeing into the wilderness. Desperate for shelter, he stumbles across a decaying US Postal Van and crawls inside. Finding a uniform and stacks of undelivered mail, he’s inspired to use the power of the mail to reunite the disparate settlements and rebuild the country.

No stranger to sweeping post-apocalyptic cinematic epics, “The Postman” sees Kevin Costner on much drier, dustier ground than his previous adventure of “Waterworld”. There’s not a great deal of difference between the characters he plays, though, and it’s hard not to see it as a miscalculation on Costner’s part to both star in and direct this movie, burdening it with the sensation that he’s simply repeating not just “Waterworld” but “Dances With Wolves” as well.

It’s a relatively sedentary film, with Costner is no hurry to tell the story and content to luxuriate and languish in the big sky countryside of Washington State, Oregon and Arizona. With a more eventful screenplay, it might have made for an entertaining limited TV series, but for a movie it really needed a much tighter edit reducing the bloated three hour running time to something pacier and more audience friendly. With Costner both helming and leading the film, it also falls into the egotistical trap of taking itself far too seriously to be any fun at all.

The premise is a hokey, sentimental invocation of a rose-tinted America fundamentally at odds with the reality represented by the Holnists but Costner’s earnest and unironic determination that he’s dealing with American high mythology undermine the movie at every turn. Of course, Costner is always watchable (although it might have been a better movie had he retained the director’s chair but given the role to someone else) and Patton makes for a solid if unspectacular villain, so the film never falls below adequate. The supporting cast are likewise fine, in a suitably grubby, photogenically post-apocalyptic fashion.

It’s a real shame, then, after investing so much time in watching the meandering adventures of a peripatetic postal worker as he takes on the rising forces of fascism that the audience is rewarded with quite possibly the most poorly choreographed, underwhelming final showdown in film history; a contretemps that barely qualifies as a scuffle, never mind an epic final battle.

There’s a half-decent story, and film, buried under all the layers of ego-driven extravagance, but the decision to make this some kind of solemn hymn to the greatness of America rather than the pulpy post-apocalyptic western it should have been means “The Postman” is a missed delivery.