I know what you wanna hear. You want to know if this movie is one of those rarest of unicorns – a movie so bad that it wraps all the way back around to awesome.

You’re right to wonder that. Certainly, all the elements are there. Standard “We have two weeks to save the club” plot – check. Lead actor chosen for an ability other than acting? It’s right there. Grafted-on but somehow boringly inevitable love story? You don’t even have to ask. Unlistenable music under the bloated production numbers? This movie stars Cher and Xtina.

Unfortunately, “Burlesque” has a great deal more in common with the ridiculous “Glitter” than it does with the accidentally sublime “Showgirls.”

First of all, Xtina is playing a teenagerish waitress in Iowa who dreams of moving to LA to do some unspecified type of singing and dancing in giant stripper heels – a sort of Dorothy with boundary issues. While this is a trope better suited to a rock video than a feature length film, the degree of difficulty is ratched up by casting the 30-year-old Aguilera as the lead. She can sing and everything, but casting her as the dewy ingenue is a little too 90210 for my tastes.

Within the first two or three minutes, she’s on her way to LA. Within another few, she’s gotten situated and fallen in love with burlesque simply by watching a showgirl take a smoke break on a fire escape. Before the first 20 are over, she’s working her way to lead dancer, and almost immediately we learn that the club is about to be seized for non-payment of something or other. This club that our heroine must save is owned, run and headlined by the 60+ Cher, who becomes Xtina’s mean but lovable mentor. There’s also a lead dancer to be deposed and a guyliner-wearing manboy to win away from his undeserving fiancee, but you won’t likely be able to care about any of it. The characters all read like placeholders – like someone was going to come back and flesh them out but ran into a deadline. You’ve seen all of it before, with better results.

The real bummer isn’t Xtina, or the cliche parade that serves as a script. The real bummer is watching Cher suck in a movie she didn’t need to make. Cher was a good actress, back when she could move her face. Sadly for everyone, she chooses to defy aging with a wicked regimen of botulinum toxin and elective surgery that renders her borderline animatronic. The director could have cast a RealDoll and gotten roughly the same level of performance.

This is the part of the review where I name the movie’s redeeming features, so I don’t look like such a grump. There aren’t any.

“Burlesque” fails on every level, including the bonus level where all that incompetence somehow becomes charming or compelling. If the urge to watch this movie comes over you, I recommend renting the 25th Anniversary version of “Showgirls” and listening to the David Schmader commentary track. You’ll thank me, I promise.