"Self/less," if you couldn’t tell from the preposterous title, is a deeply silly movie that takes itself very, very seriously.

‘SELF/LESS’ Rated: PG-13 Opens Friday

The premise is interesting enough: A dying man (Ben Kingsley) undergoes a procedure to save his mind by ditching his failing body for a shiny new model (Ryan Reynolds). But, the lofty ambitions, trite messages, half-hearted allegories and over-the-top caricatures make director Tarsem Singh’s ("The Cell," "The Fall") latest a misguidedly campy experience.

Here, the dying man, Damian (Kingsley), is possibly the worst person in the world. He is "the man who built New York from the ground up" and can ruin another’s life before lunch, almost for sport.

He’s also only got six months to live. His cancer has metastasized and he has yet to come to terms with it.

This is a selfish, egotistical man. The type who walks all the way over to the driver’s side of his town car to knock on the window so the driver will get out and open the passenger seat door for him. The type who is so consumed with his own specialness that he will pay $250 million for a new "vessel" for his brilliant mind. The type who craves immortality so wholly that he doesn’t ask too many questions about the origins of the new body.

The doctor behind the controversial "shedding" procedure, Albright (a mustache-twirling Matthew Goode), snivels that the bodies are grown in labs. Right.

Kingsley’s Damian was a sour, ruthless, brilliant man who’d constructed his own empire in a lifetime. Reynolds’ Damian is a little dopey, deeply curious and empathetic from the start, lacking even an ounce of that bitter intensity.

It’s as though they’re just two completely different men, which makes for a far less interesting film, especially when Damian begins to suspect that perhaps his new body didn’t come out of a lab.

Young Damian starts having visions of a life on a farm with a woman and child. Albright swears they’re hallucinations, but Damian is compelled to investigate — perhaps his most out of character move. Why would he start caring about others now?

That curiosity gets him entangled in the lives of the women in his visions, Madeline (Natalie Martinez) and young daughter Anna (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), who he now feels obligated to protect from a murderous Albright and his thugs.

The rest of the movie is a cat and mouse chase.

"Self/less" imagines itself as a high-concept redemption tale. But in execution, it’s more concerned with the action than the big questions or dark implications, which stay at surface level in the script from Alex Pastor and David Pastor.

The movie just assumes the audience will develop some empathy for Damian along the way, never wondering why we’d ever root for this awful billionaire — even in Ryan Reynolds’ body.