Channing Tatum stars in 'Jupiter Ascending'

EVEN IF the Wachowskis' long-delayed, reputed mega-stinker "Jupiter Ascending" fails to recoup its $200 million cost, it will not be a total loss.

At the very least it will provide awesome in-jokes for "23 Jump Street" - Jonah Hill is probably already working on "Jupiter Ascending" jokes at the expense of co-star Channing Tatum.

Tatum, of course, is the versatile superstar who can do comedy and stripper movies and "Foxcatcher" and even Nicholas Sparks adaptations, all with equal aplomb.

His challenge in "Jupiter Ascending": put on a leather outfit and deliver painfully expository dialogue that explains the latest "Matrix"-y backstory to the latest Wachowski sci-fi extravaganza.

Channing Tatum, he's our man, if he can't do it, no one can!

Well, no one can.

Least of all me. But here goes: Mila Kunis is Jupiter Jones, a Chicago house-cleaner whose valuable DNA makes her the target of palace intrigue among the scheming heirs to an interstellar ruling-class throne.

They all want to get their hands on Jupiter. One dispatches a warrior/bounty hunter named Caine (Tatum, with wolf ears) to find her. He does, falls for her and endeavors to protect her as the galactic royals (who, for some reason, like the ancient Egyptians of "Exodus," are British) seek her out for various purposes.

One (Eddie Redmayne) wants to harm her, one (Douglas Booth) wants to marry her, which is its own form of peril, since the ceremony requires her to wear a two-ton Dale Chihuly glass sculpture on her head. A third merely wants to disrobe - she's played by Tuppence Middleton, whose performance makes you wonder if the Wachowskis should have hired Sixpence Middleton.

Trouble also looms on the acting front for Redmayne, Oscar-nominated for "The Theory of Everything," trying to whisper his way through his role as the movie's wicked prince. One suspects that he was hoping Warner Bros. would delay the release of this movie until after Oscar voting had ceased.

Of course, performances in Wachowski movies have always had a stilted quality. But the mannered stoicism of Hugo Weaving and Keanu Reeves didn't make "The Matrix" any less fun.

And you can feel the Wachowskis trying to inject a sense of humor into "Jupiter Ascending." But too often the laughs derive from unintentional self-parody related to the grandiose over-reach of the Wachowskis' "world-building."

A movie world, no matter how elaborate, has to make sense on its own terms. For instance: I liked Tatum's supersonic hockey skates, but it's weird that everybody keeps forgetting he has them on, and that, like E.T., he can simply fly away from danger. Here, it's always a constant surprise to his enemies. I mean, if you took him prisoner, wouldn't you make him take them off?

In the end, buried in the rubble of their own disintegrating internal logic, the Wachowskis pull a Michael Bay, and douse the whole thing in about $150 million worth of special effects, hoping for the best. So, we get another blue-screen hero jumping from ledge to ledge of a collapsing tower, an effect we've seen so many times, we know there is no actual danger, and certainly no danger of originality.

Speaking of Bay, the Wachowskis borrow ideas from his best movie, "The Island," and from Andrew Niccol's "In Time."

Either of which can be happily substituted for this.