Despite the strenuous effort, this glass slipper just doesn’t fit.

Perhaps because the joke’s already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable.

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.

When it finally gets going, it becomes gloweringly compelling, shored up by its strong supporting players (Paddy Considine, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance also pop up), handsome photography and sheer, clanking momentum.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked.

The film is way too much like a never-give-up Saga commercial for its own good.

Raymond Cruz’s solemn performance as a skilled Mexican exorcist does the job, but the film misses a trick in not casting a more heavyweight veteran – Edward James Olmos? – to lend a little of that Max von Sydow ballast.

Anderson’s Pompeii doesn’t sweat the human stuff. His camera is mostly trained on the big picture: billowing smoke, tidal-waves, fireballs streaking through the sky. What’s happening to the people on the ground doesn’t matter, so long as we’re aware that 95 percent of them are being squashed or torched.

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

There’s bad fun to be had in the final stretch – if you go in fully aware that the production flew off the rails.

If it sounds insane on paper, the film is even more bizarre up on the screen. Demonstrating considerable skill as a director, Young gives the action an eerie, artificial sheen.

As a directing assignment, it at least proves that The Imitation Game was no fluke: Morten Tyldum can make glossily sexless, space-cadet guff out of whatever half-baked script you throw at him. The attempts at humour are wince-inducing.

As much as you may find yourself rooting for the film, it’s too blandly directed by Chris Wedge (Ice Age) to repay the favour with anything out of the ordinary.

Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.

It’s just chilly and uninvolving.

It’s a brawny, inventive action romp that’s as happy firing rockets at helicopters as it is contemplating the Cartesian model of mind-body dualism, which gives it a satisfying, sweet-and-sour tang of its own.

It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

The conclusion the directors reach could have come from any of the other Spears films

While the leads get it together somewhat in the final stretch, it can’t be the hardest job to access these teary-bonding emotions opposite an actual loved one.

This is the problem with being held hostage in the worst studio comedy of the year: for cast and audience alike, there’s little to do but wait for it to stop.

As a psychothriller, it gives itself one simple assignment – to set your heart rate pounding through the roof. And on this level, with a lurid voltage that might require health warnings, it nastily delivers.

When you compare Suicide Squad to what James Gunn and Marvel Studios achieved in Guardians of the Galaxy – low-profile property, oddball characters, make-it-fun brief – the film makes you cringe so hard your teeth come loose. But it’s a slog even on its own crushingly puerile terms.

The version we get feels like it’s been eagerly pitched, passably storyboarded, then handed over with a defeated shrug to somebody’s second unit.

Meg 2, by design, is a completely anonymous bag of lukewarm McDonalds – it’s hard to be mad at it, but only because nothing in it stands out enough to get mad at.

Strip away the wiring, and Cahill’s film connects most tangibly as a fable about drug addiction – hardly a shock, with all the crystal-obsessed scurrying to make one grey reality bearable, or switch to another outright. He’s had more ingenious ideas, but the whole thing’s strangely charming.