games people play; It seems Wes Anderson is up to his usual tricks in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

The spooky thing about being a hot young filmmaker is how quickly your personal style can become public property. Just as Pulp Fiction plunged Quentin Tarantino into a Hollywood where every violent screenplay was suddenly "Tarantinoesque," so Wes Anderson now inhabits a culture busy knocking off the quirky charm of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. The offbeat nerd comedy Napoleon Dynamite was one of 2004's sleeper hits, while the Emmy-winning sitcom Arrested Development revolves around a Tenenbaum-style family whose adults can't stop acting like children. Although imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it's not doing Anderson any favors. The very eccentricities that made his work splendidly original are coming to seem old hat.

There's a heady whiff of deja vu about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, an enjoyably messy maritime comedy that finds the 35-year-old director (dare I say it?) treading water. Bill Murray stars as the title character, a Jacques Cousteau-style oceanographer who hasn't had a hit documentary in years. When a shark kills his dearest friend, he decides to track it down, accompanied by a ragtag collection of international zanies: There's his exasperated wife (Anjelica Huston), his trusty German sidekick (Willem Dafoe), a pregnant reporter (Cate Blanchett), and the unsettling newcomer Ned (Anderson pal Owen Wilson), an Air Kentucky pilot with a gigolo's ...