The Other Boleyn Girl has all the makings of a fantastic Tudor soap: a tale of ambition, betrayal, seduction, sibling rivalry, power, lust and sex. It cries out for rumpy-pumpy, bodices full of heaving bosoms, severed heads and hunky guys in tights. Think Jackie Collins meets David Starkey.

The director, Justin Chadwick (Bleak House), doesn’t want to make that kind of film, though. He wants to do the traditional BBC costume drama; something serious and classy, with a whiff of licentiousness, but no sex, please, we’re Tudors. (Actually, the BBC has already filmed Philippa Gregory’s original novel, in 2003.) Chadwick and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan, have also avoided the Big Stuff of History: luscious panoramic shots of great armies and scenes of monarchical grandeur. They’re more interested in the small intimacies, in the big stuff of the human heart being played out. Consequently, this is history without any historical context. Politics and religion play no part here; the personal is all. If you don’t mind viewing the English Reformation, the rise of Protestantism and the foundation of the English church as the result of one man and his lust for the Boleyn sisters, then fine.

They are the young and beautiful Anne (Natalie Portman) and Mary (Scarlett Johansson). When their ambitious father (Mark Rylance) discovers that Henry VIII (Eric Bana) is fed up with the queen’s inability to give him a male heir and is looking for a mistress, he decides to offer him Anne. After a brief visit to the family home, however, Henry decides that she’s too feisty, and that he prefers the demure Mary. Though recently married, Mary is summoned to court and becomes Henry’s lover; eventually, she becomes pregnant. At this point, Anne returns from the court of France and sets out to steal Henry - with whom Mary has fallen in love. This she does, forcing Henry to dump his wife, Katherine (Ana Torrent), break with Rome, start the Reformation and make Anne his queen - all to get his wicked end away. Men! Anyway, I think we all know how the story ends.

This is a tale about two sisters whose love for each other is destroyed in the pursuit of love: for Mary it is the love of Henry, for Anne the love of power and position. What Morgan’s screen-play doesn’t make clear is whether Anne is doing this for her ambitious father, for her religious convictions or merely to get revenge on her sister.

As a tale of sibling rivalry, it is not exactly up there with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - instead of a real battle of the bitches, we get the scheming, cruel trollop Anne plotting against the good and sweet Mary. Both girls are a lot duller than they are in Gregory’s book. There, Mary shocked her family by her promiscuity while visiting the French court, and Anne was far more sadistic than she is portrayed here.

Johansson never brings Mary alive so we can actually feel something for her plight. Here is a young girl who has been betrayed by her father, by the man she loves (Henry) and by the sister she once loved, but there’s no sense of the horror and humiliation of her situation. Does she feel any sense of self-disgust or anger at what has happened? Mary remains a closed and distant figure.

Portman, meanwhile, never makes Anne into a larger-than-life figure who can carry the film. She’s not a Becky Sharp or a Nell Gwyn. We never have a sneaking admiration for her scheming ways and casual cruelty. And her seduction of Henry is something of a mystery. When she returns from France, she’s as feisty as before, so why does Henry fall for her now? And why cast the refined Portman - though she’s a classily pretty woman - as the object of lust over the earthier Johansson?

Given that Chadwick has assembled such an attractive cast, here is a real chance to make history sexy by putting back the sex. Instead, whenever things hot up behind closed doors, the film goes all gauzy and coy on us, though it would actually be germane to the story if it were more explicit. How does a woman feel about sleeping with the king of England? Was it a duty or a delight?

This is especially true given that it’s the handsome Bana in the role. His Henry avoids all the cinematic clichés of the fat guy chucking chicken bones over his shoulder - a kind of medieval Elvis - but it’s a colourless performance. You never get a sense that this man is in the grip of a sexual passion that will force him to change the course of English history. The whole film is so lifeless and earnest, it ends up as the dry, dull stuff of history it tries so hard to avoid.

12A, 115 mins

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