Yet another completely unnecessary prequel or live adaptation or tie-in or whatever from the genius collective at the Disney marketing department that for some reason has a reputation for being an actually good movie. What it actually is is “tortured,” as in it exhausts so much energy squaring the circle of why we should be rooting for a character whose only real purpose has for decades been to embody pure, puppy-murdering evil. As an indicator of just how bizarrely at cross-purposes this is, consider the fact that its founding text is a movie about the inherent, human family-like adorability of dogs, Dalmatians specifically, but here for some obscene reason Dalmatians are portrayed as vicious, killer attack automatons. To watch this is to watch would-be auteur Craig Gillespie furiously defending two sides of a ping pong table as he desperately tries to make Emma Stone both sympathetic and demonstrably capable of being more dastardly than her antagonist. And what an antagonist! Sorry, I mean, what a boring-ass antagonist! Emma Thompson manages to eke out just a modicum of creativity from her role as some kind of fashion super villain, but the part is nothing more than a discounted, ready-to-wear derivative of Meryl Streep’s “Devil Wears Prada.” Part of what feels so tiresome about this movie is how often it tries to shock you with Thompson’s ostensibly over-the-top gestures of jaded, upper class evil, but none of it feels new or surprising in the slightest. What’s truly weird—well, it’s all weird and not in a good way, but what’s truly confounding is that Gillespie has so much work to do, so many incoherent plot threads to rationalize, and yet at the same time the film feels profoundly pokey, lumbering along as it makes points that a more fleet footed movie would be able to dash off in half the time. At 134 minutes it’s way too long and yet it doesn’t spend its time wisely; not only does it utterly fail at making us understand why we should root for Cruella but it leaves several characters in limbo, never truly figuring out why they’re there. For two characters this purposelessness is nominally resolved in the post-credits sequence, a clumsy, infuriating groaner that tries to connect to the original “101 Dalmatians” with flagrant shamelessness. It’s a capper of an idea that’s meant to bring meaning to everything that came before, but its craven absurdity only brings clarity to the idea that this movie is nothing more than a cash grab.