Tchaikovsky’s glorious music is the only thing that survives in Andrei Konchalovsky’s spectacularly misconceived, bloated and incredibly ugly fantasy epic “The Nutcracker in 3-D.”
For his first major film since “Tango and Cash” more than two decades ago, the Russian director of “Runaway Train” offers a CGI-loaded, filmed-in-Hungary goulash that’s part Holocaust allegory, part “Alice in Wonderland,” part “The Wizard of Oz” — and entirely stupid.
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic story may have survived a ballet film with Macaulay Culkin, but here it’s up against poorly executed Michael Bay-style pyrotechnics on hideous, massive sets that look like they’re left over from “The Golden Compass.” Tchaikovsky’s music is paired with inane lyrics by Tim Rice that defeat even a trouper like Nathan Lane, who in this version is playing a benevolent Uncle Albert whose last name is apparently Einstein in 1920s Vienna.
The less vocally gifted (to put it kindly) Elle Fanning plays his niece Mary (nee Clara) who dreams that a nutcracker her uncle gives her is really a prince (the appropriately wooden Charlie Rowe) cursed by the Rat Queen (Frances de la Tour, who doubles, “Oz”-style, as Mary’s nanny).
Through the efforts of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Yuliya Vysotskaya, the director’s wife, also cast as Mary’s mother), they all end up in the prince’s former kingdom.
There the Hitler-like Rat King (John Turturro, who also makes dubious vocal contributions) burns toys in what look alarmingly like concentration-camp crematoria.
None of this frantic, random cultural rummaging — at one point Mary’s father actually says “remember what Dr. Freud said about child psychology” — is remotely entertaining, much less charming.
As for the other supposed selling point of “The Nutcracker in 3-D” — if you don’t get a headache from the script and the explosions, the blurry stereoscopic cinematography will certainly do the trick.