Wow. I hate to dog pile on Sony at this difficult time, but the new Annie is arguably one of the worst movies of the year. If only it could have been pulled from release instead of The Interview! I envision horrified executives, after watching the final cut, taking a meeting and asking each other, “Is there any way we can blame this hot mess on the hack?”

It had plenty of potential, with a cast including Jamie Foxx, Rose Byrne, Bobby Cannavale, Cameron Diaz and Quvenzhané Wallis, who so dazzled us in Beasts of the Southern Wild, which she mastered when she was six-year-old. Now that she’s 11, co-writer/director Will Gluck (whose Easy A was quite good) did her no favors by casting her in a roll where she’d have to dance and belt out classic numbers like a veteran. Instead of acting, she continuously mugs. And her singing is so obviously pitch corrected that you have no idea if she has a real voice or not.

She’s in good company, though. Every actor in the film relies heavily on pitch correction and sounds bizarrely electronic, even Jamie Foxx, who can actually sing quite well without the help of sound engineers and software. The songs are shamelessly overproduced with a soulless, kiddie channel hip hop vibe that will grate on the nerves of anyone who has ever seen a stage production of Annie. I ask you, what are Jay Z and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith even doing as producers if they can’t give the music its due?

And don’t get me started on the dancing — Rose Byrne shuffles along looking embarrassed, Bobby Cannavale cavorts gracelessly, and by the time Stephanie Kurtzuba, playing a helpful government bureaucrat, starts doing back flips in Will Stack’s (Foxx) luxury apartment, you realize the choreographers might have taken a powder and sent in an overeager high school sophomore to substitute (my apologies to high school sophomores). The only one who the hapless flailing seems to work for is Cameron Diaz, clearly miscast as an ornery, drunk Miss Hannigan. They’ve written her part as the orphan’s foster mom so that she’s a former member of a failed 80’s pop band, who never quite got over it, so at least her exaggeratedly bad singing and dancing make sense. Even the dog is awkward and charmless, but then again, what did you expect when they cast a Shiba Inu as Sandy?

Recently I was listening to a panel of erudite, East Coast film critics on NPR discussing Exodus: Gods and Kings. “Do we really need another Moses story when it was already done in The Ten Commandments?” they asked urbanely. I wanted to shout at the radio, “Come on–that was over 50 years ago and it’s an epic story that’s been around for thousands of years. Do we really need another Spiderman? Do we really need another Sherlock Holmes? And most of all, do we really need another Annie?” I think not.

Rated PG

1 Hour 58 Minutes