You don’t often hear Ang Lee, modern cinema’s great chronicler of characters divided against themselves, compared to Paul Verhoeven, the ferocious Dutch-born filmmaker whose whole career seems devoted to the prospect that Europeans are not wimps. But Lee’s new Lust, Caution has essentially the same plot as Verhoeven’s most recent effort, the arthouse hit Black Book. In both films, set during World War II, a young woman who has attracted the eye of an official of the occupation government is encouraged by the resistance to exploit that attraction. And in both films her bedding of the man she is stalking brings her closer to him than she had planned to get. The difference between the movies is that where Verhoeven’s movie was an occasionally farfetched but exciting adventure with lots of sex, Lust, Caution is a dull, draggy drama whose NC-17 is going to bring in all of the wrong people for the wrong reasons. I can’t be too clear about this: If you see that NC-17 logo and think you’re going to be in for a hot time, you’ll probably have dozed off by the time the scenes the MPAA considers unfit for young eyes unspool. Lee’s film runs for two hours and 37 minutes, too much of which is backdrop to the main part of the story: In 1938 China, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is a university freshman who becomes involved in a student plot to assassinate a top collaborator with the occupation Japanese government. The plan goes awry, but several years later in Shanghai Wong is drawn back into a different version of the same plot, this time with less youthful innocence. And if that means giving into the brutal sexual demands of collaborator Mr. Yee (the usually mild Tony Leung Chiu Wai in a change-of-pace role), so be it. I saw Lust, Caution at the smorgasbord that is the Toronto Film Festival, where quantity can crowd out quality on the palette, so I will concede that I may have overlooked some of the film’s subtleties. Still, someone would have to give me a pretty good argument to get me to sit through this again.