Today is World AIDS Day, and the new film “3 Needles” has pegged its release to the event in an effort to raise money for AIDS charities. Hopefully it will succeed in that task, because it certainly fails as entertainment. This attempt to show how the disease mutates and changes across the globe is a veritable mosaic of guts, gore, and blood. But in searching for the universal nature of AIDS, director Thom Fitzgerald makes the mistake of depicting the heroes and villains of this epidemic in equal lights.

Olympia Dukakis serves as narrator and nun in the film. After African men rape and kill a virgin, she intones, “Who am I to judge them?” The film takes a similar approach with the foreign cultures it depicts but seems to have no trouble finding fault with the Western world.

Mr. Fitzgerald has blanketed the victims of the disease with an overreaching inculpability. He positively portrays a blood runner who spreads AIDS through the Chinese countryside, a porn star who knowingly infects the people with whom he works, and a woman who seeks out the disease to scam her insurance company. To add shock value, Mr. Fitzgerald peppers the film with dirty syringes, pools of contaminated blood, and a mother licking the infected blood of her son.

Mr. Fitzgerald’s script traverses three countries ravaged by the disease. Set in China, Canada, and South Africa, “3 Needles” attempts to gather support to fight the changing faces of a disease that continues to spread and kill despite the existence of highly effective drugs to treat the disease in the developed world.

Though the film is beautifully shot, filled with talented actors, and premised on the best intentions, it ultimately fails to make a coherent point. Its characters repeatedly make the wrong decision. And though Mr. Fitzgerald seems to have decided that his job as filmmaker was the relativist goal of trying to understand every culture equally, the only value judgment that he allows his film to make is against his own.

The film begins in Africa, where a young boy is infected with AIDS during a coming-of-age ritual. It then moves to China, where Lucy Liu plays Jin Ping, who collects blood from peasants that is presumably intended to help people but only manages to spread a disease she cannot identify. Though she knows she is killing people, Jin Ping refrains from taking action because she owes money to a man who has the same mystery illness and who forces her to fetch the blood for transfusions. After people in the third city she infects begin to drop like flies and her man seems to be succumbing to the virus, she leaves him. This is supposedly a strong move on her part, but thousands of women without AIDS have left men in another incapacitated state — it’s called sleep.

Next the film moves to Montreal, where Shawn Ashmore plays a porn star named Denys with a heart of gold and a penchant for spreading AIDS. He supports his mother (Stockard Channing) and ailing father (Aubert Pallascio) with his earnings, and rather than get a job that doesn’t necessitate swapping bodily fluids, he cheats on his blood test to keep the checks coming. When his father dies anyway and his scheme is discovered, Denys’s mother infects herself with AIDS so she can cash in on her life insurance and buy her son some sweet video games.

Then finally, the film returns to Africa, where the young man with AIDS has matured into a rapist and Chloë Sevigny’s Catholic novice has come to Africa with Ms. Dukakis’s saintly narrator and an underutilized Sandra Oh to convert the natives. But it wouldn’t make much sense to cast Ms. Sevigny as a nun if she didn’t slip out of the habit a few times. She sacrifices her virginity for the welfare of a family of orphans and learns that she cares about people too much to become a nun. Too late she realizes that the orphans are unwittingly spreading the virus by recycling infected syringes that the missionary uses.

Shortly after this segment shows the futility of Western efforts to stop the spread of the disease, Ms. Dukakis’s voiceover chimes in again, asking, “When all of mankind has a common enemy in this virus, why have we not joined together at last in order to fight it? I’m afraid of the answer.”

The implication is that the Western world has not done enough to fight the epidemic. Surely there is more to be done, but if there is one lesson that this film points toward, it is that the confused and varied fronts of this war will not be easily won.

But Mr. Fitzgerald’s film is less interested in that than in trying to shock the audience into action with appalling behavior shrouded in vague solipsisms. Most every terrible situation depicted in the film is something that happens because of ignorance or complacency in dealing with the AIDS virus. But in only criticizing the slow response of the developed world to react to this crisis, the director does no favors to the cultures he presents, or his film.

As a director, Mr. Fitzgerald has a knack for creating picturesque scenes, but he also has trouble using them to any purposeful effect. This habit is especially aggravating at the end of the film, when Ms. Dukakis’s voiceover responds to a particularly brutal scene with these words: “Once a prayer ascends to heaven, it floats there … forever.” Once again, Mr. Fitzgerald proves his ability to say nothing very beautifully.