For a few weeks now, “Death of a President,” the faux documentary that imagines the assassination of George W. Bush, has been hard to miss on news and opinion programs. Always good for a segment or two, the hue and cry writes itself: disrespect for the office, poor taste, a meddling foreigner’s schadenfreude fantasy. (The filmmaker, Gabriel Range, is British.)

Accusations aside, “Death of a President” is, if nothing else, a symptom of its heady time. Politically, its would-be critique — imagining the aftereffects of the traumatic event — seems to well up from the fears (and, more darkly, the desires) of a divided nation, and, indeed, a divided world. Likewise, the literal-minded realism of the film, which mixes actual archival footage with digital insertions and re-creations, reflects an age born under the fully, mercilessly televised atrocities of September 11, 2001.

All of which leaves unanswered another (and, as it turns out, far easier) question: Is it any good? As a film, rather than a phenomenon, “Death of a President” looks less intriguing without the bloom of scandal. Advance reports, probably from those psychics who had not seen it, conjured up a harrowing depiction of the murder and an elaborate what-if alternate history to follow. But Mr. Range (who at least prudently treats the murder with unsensational briskness) devotes much of his movie to a dull whodunit, colored in with unimaginative political period detail.

As the film opens, one year from now, protesters are massing outside the Chicago hotel where President Bush is to address a business conference. Somber retrospective interviews with sometimes anxious, sometimes reverential figures narrate the queasy lead-up to the dreadful event. A Secret Service agent recalls his premonitions about the exit rope-line; Bush’s speechwriter eulogizes; a journalist looks constipated with distress.

A nutcase breaks away, “it” happens, and then, let the forensics begin! For what seems a long time, “Death” treads water as a History Channel procedural, quoting experts and chasing down surveillance shots and unreliable witnesses. There’s some relief from James Urbaniak, an actor who clearly understands the folksy self-dramatization of the talking heads, as a forensics expert, and from a sarcastic FBI agent (Michael Reilly Burke).

But the remainder is like a thought experiment that wasn’t given enough thought. Clumsily paced and structured, “Death” dissipates into transparent red herrings about wrongfully accused Muslims and rote routines about the new President Cheney’s foregone rush to war with Syria. The odd clever detail, like a cherry-picking Ahmed Chalabi-like Syrian exile, is swept away in the drawn-out denouement involving an unbalanced war veteran.

The film’s evident parallel is to the twists and turns of America’s path since September 11. But as a political film, the stubborn literal-mindedness and lack of imagination makes “Death” virtually a nonstarter. While scoring easy points, Mr. Range misses the more difficult portrait of a traumatized nation recovering from a shock.

Rather than critiquing the exploitation of trauma to political ends, his incomplete (and torpid) drama simply replicates what he wants to condemn.

Mr. Range, a Briton whose last fake documentary chronicled a paralyzing mass transit shutdown in England, hasn’t penetrated the American experience. In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” another such flashpoint work, Michael Moore plainly knew exactly which of our buttons to push in a masterpiece of provocation and propaganda. The devious sleight-of-hand in that film’s editing was likewise technically and intuitively brilliant without resorting to the mock-up gimmickry of “Death of a President.”

The visual trickery might identify “Death” as more of an inevitable byproduct of press trends than a serious political piece. As a film, it’s merely a successor to the little-noticed 2004 drama “Assassination of Richard Nixon” starring Sean Penn, and to an earlier festival cause celebre, “Nothing So Strange,” which dramatized the assassination of Bill Gates. The link connecting them all is the modern urge to synthesize evinced in YouTube’s mash-up videos, re-edited trailers, and other fanboy-fanatical digital manipulation.

To his credit, Mr. Range leaves few stitches showing in his Frankenstein footage. Archival clips of President Cheney delivering someone else’s funeral oration are impressively tailored to the fictional event with a few snips and the audio addition of a few more words voiced by a Cheney impersonator. But Mr. Range, or his PR people, are overreaching in their evocations of his countryman Peter Watkins, the incisive pioneer of this brand of trompe l’oeil docudramas. (Mr. Watkins’s post-nuke nightmare, “War Game,” was deemed too frighteningly realistic to be broadcast by the BBC, because of its unflinching scenes of death and disorder, but it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary.)

“Death” may send up the frisson of the forbidden, much as “The Day After” (our own Cold War horror film) did in an earlier and different age of paranoia, but its Patriot Act games are ultimately too tedious and predictable to be very titillating. And the film’s conclusions are too silly for anyone to empathize with the assassin.

The distributor of “Death of a President,” Newmarket films, may think they’ve backed another winner with self-generating publicity to set alongside their previous controversial releases like “The Passion of the Christ,” “The Woodsman,” and “Downfall.” But more likely, they’ve enabled the feckless Mr. Range to get a daily Secret Service check-up on every trip he spends in the States.

But in a free society, people will continue to make such works (for some real, juicy exploitation involving a president, see Robert Coover’s 1977 novel “The Public Burning”). And if you want to get complicated about the power of images and how films capture or feed a zeitgeist, then the real release to scrutinize this weekend isn’t “Death,” but the third installment in the enormously, disturbingly profitable torture-horror franchise, “Saw.” That’s a bit more worrisome than some Brit hitting talking points.