There are some mildly diverting moments, and it’s pleasing to see Ed Harris emerge later on in a significant set piece. Like everything else in this ill-judged effort, his appearance is a wasted opportunity.

Hallstrom also works wonders with the principal cast, finding hidden depths in Cline and mostly neutralising Apa’s unnerving propensity for blinkless serial killer stares (it’s like he’s going for Blue Steel but just, well, misses).

It looks great, and Cronin is a gifted stylist. But, as with his debut The Hole in the Ground, there’s too much slavish imitation and homage here. His greatest accomplishment is the downtime family scenes. They throb with easy realism. He should dump horror and do drama instead.

It could be seen as a cynical capitalist move by the best businesswoman in the game. And it definitely is — at least partly.

Coen has gone back to his happy place but this time he’s not taken the audience with him.

Ultimately, bar some tedious spell-making scenes, nothing happens. Harrowingly poor.

There is seemingly an ironic undertow to Urban’s character. He’s from “the Earthrealm”, aka Earth, and is a washed-up former action star in the Chuck Norris mould. It’s supposed to be a clever wink to the audience and a quirky acknowledgement that this is all pretty awful, right? As if joking about the stench of a sewer will somehow make it smell sweeter.

The director Todd Phillips said there would be no follow-up to the original, but he changed his mind and the result is a derivative musical.

The most memorable aspect is also the best memorial to Hutchins’s skills — the on-screen composition of beautiful, open landscapes, captured in daytime and dusk, and at night the flickering of fire illuminating Baldwin and McDermott’s faces as they talk.

It’s so inane and confused, in fact, that it suggests there are no storytelling iterations left for the Marvel Cinematic Universe other than, perhaps, a wounded retreat into the overloaded one-joke irony of the Deadpool flicks.

Ayo Edebiri, the award-winning star of The Bear, is on typically charismatic form here, delivering droll reaction shots and angsty frowns aplenty on a one-woman mission to rescue this extraordinarily toothless celebrity satire and half-cocked horror.

Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) begins as an ambitious, metatextual, multicharacter ensemble drama, with various key cast members playing dual roles. But it rambles on too long, losing much of its early charm and focus in a ponderous, undercooked second half.

This Indiana Jones knock-off is staggeringly slapdash.

There’s little dramatic jeopardy here and certainly no danger. Instead, by the closing credits Cécile has barely changed, and the musical around her has barely registered. Sorry, the film with songs in it.

It’s left to Leonidas, in the only substantial female part, to steal the show. She plays Dani with an easygoing naturalism that bestows some much needed soul upon the project and suggests that Love might yet have a glittering future ahead in women-centred melodramas. If only he could ditch the swaggering.

Mackey is fine but wasted, and still clearly anticipating a role to top her astounding Emily from 2022. The political messaging, meanwhile, is grimly bromidic.

This is the quintessential Trump-era film, where difficult truths are met with bold-faced mendacity and where the director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and the screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator) have met the challenges of the Jackson story by simply drowning it in quasi-Christian, yes, bullshit.

So why two stars? Because it’s inoffensive and criticising it feels like punching down. And because Martin Clunes, playing a grouchy landlord, is really quite good.

You know that your comedy is in crisis when you’ve substituted actual jokes for the grating rhythms of an oompah band. Still, Pfeiffer remains charismatic till the end. She deserved better.

It doesn’t help that the director, Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me), has seemingly chosen to fill the narrative longueurs with endless drone shots of the Irish countryside. Pretty, yes. But they can only offer so much damage limitation.

The film is torturous to sit through and, for me, provoked periods of actual physical discomfort. I had to stab myself repeatedly in the hand with a pen to distract from the howling distress. It’s that bad, and that offensive.

It remains ludicrous to the end but it’s never anything less than entertaining.

Worst of all, and quite baffling for a film that was directed and cowritten by the franchise creator, Kevin Williamson, this isn’t even about articulate teens deconstructing horror films any more. There are a handful of limp references to AI deepfakes but otherwise all the sharp culture awareness, and certainly all the irony, has been removed. It’s as if nobody realised that a Scream movie without the irony is just a bad horror movie. Roll on Scream 8?

Pratt is fine, and blandly likeable in the manner of a not-especially-demanding labrador, but the prospect of his blameless heroism is always depressingly inevitable and the identity of the real villain is conspicuous from almost the first scene.

It’s badly shot, full of pointless jeopardy-free action sequences, with a flat-lining story and airless characters poorly performed by floundering actors at their lowest ebb. The search continues for DeBose.

Every single scene here is about what the scene is about, creating the deepest vat of cinematic s**t imaginable. The screenplay is shamefully inept.

The two Spider-Verse movies proved that brash and branded Hollywood entertainment does not have to sacrifice novelty and innovation. Smurfs, on the other hand? Profoundly, oppressively empty. There’s no reason to see it.

The look is mid-period Transformers. The dramatic tension non-existent. And the performances uniformly weak. This is top-dollar tedium.