The most profound character in “Transsiberian,” the new drama from writer-director Brad Anderson (“The Machinist”), may be the frozen countryside our heroes Roy (Woody Harrelson), and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are traveling over by train. The images Anderson gives us of Siberia’s vast tundra — from aerial views of the Trans-Siberian Express chugging through endless snowy forests to a particularly lovely shot of a dappled stallion startled by the train — show us Russia’s frontier as we imagine it: wild and often savage, but with an unfiltered beauty.

“Transsiberian” follows the story of an American couple, who, on the train from Beijing to Moscow, get caught up in a drug-smuggling ring. This “Brokedown Palace”-esque film relies heavily upon audience empathy to achieve its narrative goals. Filmmakers attempt to sway the audience into rooting for the relationship between Iowa goober-boy Roy and his former-bad girl wife Jessie; if you don’t, it’s hard to care about any of the highly unbelievable, highly unfortunate circumstances they find themselves in.

Here’s where the filmmakers fail, though: The relationship is doomed to fail anyway. He’s a devout Christian; she’s not. He wants kids; she doesn’t. He’s head-over-heels in love with her; she’s making eyes at the first hottie who enters their train compartment. There’s no way this relationship is going to last, and we don’t particularly want it to.

The aforementioned hottie, by the way, is a worldly Spaniard named Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), who is allegedly returning with his American girlfriend Abby (Kate Mara) from teaching English in Japan. Carlos, Abby, Jessie and Roy strike up a friendship of circumstances, with the women bonding over their shared history as teenage runaways and the men bonding over their shared love of vodka.

The trouble begins when, while stretching his legs in Irkutsk, Roy misses the train. The other three disembark at the next station, Carlos and Jessie kind of hook up, some drugs get planted somewhere they don’t belong, and eventually Roy and Jessie run afoul of a crooked Russian narcotics detective named Grinko (Ben Kingsley). Without giving away too much, they keep all their toes.

Aside from audience empathy, the thing that makes a suspenseful drama interesting is a subtle, twisting plot with insinuations that mean one thing when you first hear them and something completely different when you recall them later. “Transsiberian” doesn’t have many of those.

For the most part, Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy approach the film’s narrative with the subtlety of a baboon on steroids being chased by an elephant, who is also on steroids. Abby steals a sidewise glance at a mysterious man on the train platform, then suddenly decides it’s time to go back in. Jessie leaves Carlos alone in her room, and the camera racks focus onto her suitcase. The indications of what’s going on are so obvious that Anderson and Conroy may as well have said, “Hey, guys, Carlos is a drug dealer, and now he’s gonna put the drugs in Jessie’s bag!” Time and time again, Anderson and Conroy miss an opportunity to fool the viewer, instead merely validating everything we knew from the very beginning.

There are good things about “Transsiberian.” As has been said before, Harrelson is an absolute charmer. Mortimer occasionally shines as the troubled and in-over-her-head Jessie, though for the most part her performance comes across as stale. The movie does a nice job of mixing suspense and gore with humor. And, of course, there are the lovely shots of a land most Americans will never see — whether it’s in real life or because of the movie’s mediocrity.