Starring: Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Stephen Tobolowsky, Christopher McDonald, Brad Pitt.

But it's really a (fashion) victim of its time. Poor Thelma and Louise should have been made in the 1970s as an unpolished, low-budget production by Robert Altman or Bob Rafelson or someone with a feel for the raw and messy -- but sometimes extraordinary -- possibilities of human life. But it's too late for that now. It's the '90s, and everyone and everything is viewed as a commodity. And, as if we needed any more evidence of that sad fact, British director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Black Rain) has taken the lower-middle-class feminist rage at the heart of Thelma and Louise and plastic-packaged it as a feature-length perfume commercial targeted at knee-jerk "feminists."

Fortunately, however, luminous lead actresses Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are strong and vital enough that they resist being fashioned into mannequins in Scott's fastidiously arranged, wide-screen window display. Scott should stick to directing movies about aliens and androids and just forget about the Earth and its people. He and cinematographer Adrian Biddle shoot their actors and the rough, awe-inspiring landscapes of the American southwest as if they were making travel agency posters or fashion layouts -- a method that suffocates and sugarcoats the compelling passions below that glossy surface.

Thelma and Louise fits into the fugitive-couple-on-the-run order of movies such as You Only Live Once, They Live By Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us and Badlands, to name a few. The difference, of course, is that, here, both parts of the couple are female, on the run in a man's world full of sexist slobs and patronizing patriarchs. But what should have been an exciting, unpredictable journey of self-discovery for these women too often feels like it's been road-mapped in advance, even though there's no clear destination.

And a truck driver who makes lewd remarks to Thelma and Louise is portrayed as such a grotesquely ridiculous cretin that he fails to represent any serious threat to them. Really, how intimidating can a slobbering, two-dimensional 'toon be? His fate is drained of meaning because he's too freakish to actually stand in for the panting male sexism that he's supposed to represent. Both these guys are oversized cardboard villains, knocked over with bludgeons rather than skewered with satirical daggers. This is the equivalent of Alan Parker's racist Mississippi Burning, which posits that all racists are easily identifiable by their hideous physical malformations, when in fact racism and sexism are insidious because they manifest themselves in thousands of inconspicuous ways, not because the people who perpetuate them are just plain ugly, inside and out.

In the depiction of four other crucial male characters, however, (Thelma and Louise are virtually the only women in the movie, except for a few waitresses) the movie is more successfully complex. J.D. (Brad Pitt), a sweet-talking, seductive young hitchhiker to whom Thelma takes a shine is the ideal blend of golden boy and con man. Harlan (Timothy Carhart), a good ol' boy pick-up artist who comes on to Thelma at a truck stop saloon, changes from charming to threatening with terrifying suddenness. Hal (Harvey Keitel) is a kind of guardian angel police officer who empathizes with and feels protective of Thelma and Louise, even as he helps track them down. And Jimmy (Michael Madsen), Louise's noncommittal boyfriend, is a wandering musician who loves her but hasn't the faintest idea of how to express it.

And while there's some cheap-thrill cathartic value to seeing the gender tables turned, that's not enough to sustain it, even with this terrific cast. For better or worse, Sarandon and Davis just seem so much smarter and livelier than this patronizing material. Gender-switching a traditional male-oriented genre is an intriguing place to start, but Thelma and Louise only key-scratches the lustrous surface, and then takes a joy ride off into the pre-fab, picture-pretty sunset.