I used the commercial CD installer set ($15, what the heck) and Install Unsupported... to run the CD's installer into the Win2k bottle. Takes a while and at some points looks like it's dead, but it does eventually install (although you have to do a force at the end). After installation the FarCry setup program runs fine, I was able to select a suitable "low end" setup for testing.
Running the game itself originally crashed out with a missing DLL message, so I found a copy of the DLL on the 'net and put it into the app folder. That didn't seem to help, but then I recalled that there had been several patches to fix various issues. So I downloaded the latest full patcher, 1.4, and it also installed fine.
Now the game exits with a -1 immediately after startup. There are no errors or anything interesting in the log, so I think it may be a deliberate exit. I'll be playing with it a bit over the next couple of days.