Photo Courtesy Of Fox Searchlight Robin Williams is your photo processor from hell in the new movie "One Hour Photo," snapping into Tucson area theaters Friday.

The only thing worse than a bad movie is a good movie that wastes its potential. While it lays out a feast of good imagery and fresh, creepy situations, "One Hour Photo" has eyes bigger than its stomach.

The film is intriguing, especially near the beginning. The opening title sequence alone, which displays the credits as if they were tiny labels on frames of film as they are being processed, is enough to make the film's prospects seem bright, or in this case, dark.

Robin Williams, following an apparent trend in his career, plays a disturbingly prim one-hour photo technician at a Wal-Mart-like superstore. Williams brings to this film the same mild-mannered-yet-dangerously-unhinged demeanor he fashioned for "Insomnia," but with an added sense of urgent desperation that makes him seem like a demented child on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

This is apparent from the very first time we see Williams' character, Sy Parrish. The film begins with Sy having his mug shots taken in a police station interrogation room, a dark foreshadowing omen that will put us on edge for the rest of the film.

Sy then begins to narrate a flashback in which he describes his affection for a young family he has come to know through developing their photos. The story progresses as Sy becomes more and more fixated on the family, even waiting outside their house and buying gifts for the young son.

Eventually, Sy becomes unable to control himself and does something rash, which does not warrant description. He ends up in the police station, quietly telling his story with all the calm and composure of Norman Bates at the end of "Psycho."

All in all, Williams gives an interesting performance. And the style of the film is fascinating at times, like the particular way in which the filmmakers printed the celluloid, making it look like machine-developed snapshots with bright, uneven color and poor focus, but this effect magically wears off halfway through the film.

There are even a few moments of honest-to-goodness horror, like when Sy dreams that his eyes are bleeding or handles chemicals in a grotesque gas mask, but they are so few and far between that they hardly seem like part of the movie.

What really kills the film is its cure-all ending, in which Sy explains to his interrogator in plain language that he did his disgusting little act because he was mistreated as a child.

This is an all-too-common cop-out in films lately. Filmmakers are so afraid of offending people into not buying tickets for the whole family that they won't risk validating their vision of an interesting, potentially beautiful film.

But Sy has to be just like us, just a misunderstood guy who wants someone to love him.

Frankly, the whole thing would have been much more creepy, and much more interesting, if he had just been a sicko.