In addition to a handful of excellent film adaptations, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and English playwright William Shakespeare have one metatextual artistic trait in common: the paradoxical ability to produce art that is firmly rooted in a native culture but also incredibly universal.

For instance, Kurosawa’s early samurai epics, “The Seven Samurai” (1954) and “Yojimbo” (1961), which are both firmly planted in Japanese culture, became Americanized to great success in “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) and “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964).

Kurosawa did a bit of adaptation himself, turning “MacBeth” into “Throne of Blood” (1957) and “King Lear” into his masterpiece “Ran” (1987). But in the middle of all these variations, Kurosawa produced “The Bad Sleep Well” (1960), an incredibly loose adaptation of “Hamlet” that fails to reach the quality set by Kurosawa’s more focused efforts.

In “The Bad Sleep Well,” Hamlet’s story has been shifted to the Japanese corporate world, though all the texts really have in common are the overarching themes. The film was influenced just as much by “Hamlet” as it was by American film noir.

And that seems to be partially the problem. Kurosawa takes all of these inspirations and tries to give them their due. By doing so, he creates a film that clocks in around two and a half hours, making much of “The Bad Sleep Well” irrelevant and redundant.

The film star Toshiro Milfune plays Nishi, the Hamlet figure. It begins with Nishi marrying the daughter of his boss, Iwabuchi, the president of Public Corp.

During the wedding scene — which, like the beginning of Coppolla’s “The Godfather,” takes up the first half-hour of the film and introduces us to nearly all of the characters — Kurosawa relays to the viewer that Public Corp. and the Dairyu Corp. have entered into some corrupt dealings. And these have resulted in mysterious suicides and a police investigation.

For a film structured around Nishi’s quest for revenge, Kurosawa structures it in an incredibly flawed manner. The audience is not given a clear view of Nishi’s character until close to the hour mark. This keeps the Nishi character always at arm’s length to the audience, making it incredibly hard to sympathize with anyone.

Kurosawa seems to be doing so to make the identity of the person seeking revenge on the corporations mysterious, but to any well-tuned audience member (or anyone familiar with Hamlet), it is clear in the opening scenes that the person is Nishi.

There are, however, some wonderfully constructed sequences within its overlong narrative, especially the scene where one of the corrupt company members is convinced that he is being haunted by the ghost of one of his co-workers who was believed deceased.

On the DVD side of things, Criterion has done a wonderful job restoring the picture and audio, especially the film’s jazzy score. But from an extras point of view, those expecting the typical Criterion treatment that was given to “Ran” and “Kagemusha” will be disappointed. The disc includes the latest episode in a series of documentaries placed on the lower-end Criterion/Kurosawa discs, a theatrical trailer and a pair of essays.

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