NEW YORK, April 22 — Is The Huntsman: Winter’s War the worst movie of the year? It’s too early to say, of course, and it’s a complicated question, since there are so many varieties of bad movie. There are grandiose failures driven by overreaching ambition. There are spectacles of stupefying incompetence. Dumb ideas and baffling choices are never in short supply. Nor are follies and blunders and train wrecks.

The conventional wisdom holds that none of these disasters happen on purpose, that nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie. The Huntsman challenges that idea, since it seems to be exactly the movie that the money behind it wanted to see made. Its badness is not extreme, but exemplary: It’s everything wrong with Hollywood today stuffed into a little less than two hours.

This is especially dispiriting because Snow White and the Huntsman — in relation to which this Huntsman is both sequel and prequel — was far from a terrible piece of entertainment. It was a dark, blood-tinged modern interpretation of an old fairy tale, with tough Cockney dwarves and a memorable villain in the regal, wrathful person of Charlize Theron’s Ravenna.

That movie, directed by Rupert Sanders, could be described as a re-imagining of the Snow White story. It found a new idea in old material. Winter’s War, in contrast, directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan from a many-authored script, is more of a de-imagining. It has no ideas at all, just second-hand and half-baked concepts.

Every resonant theme or intriguing story possibility is stripped away and replaced with a ready-made franchise-movie conceit. The filmmakers compensate for emptiness with redundancy. There are two pairs of funny dwarves and two imperious villainesses and a love interest for the title character. (Snow White, played by Kristen Stewart once upon a time in 2011, is no longer around). More is not more.

Ravenna has a sister named Freya, who is played by Emily Blunt. Theron shows up early and late, at one point in a costume of golden feathers that makes her look like the mascot for a superglamorous drive-through fried-chicken joint. Freya, who shoots ice crystals out of her fingertips, presides over a frozen kingdom and is motivated to do evil out of thwarted maternal feelings. This is an interesting example of Hollywood sexism at work. Disappointed love of some kind — romantic in Ravenna’s case, parental in Freya’s — seems to be a requirement for female evildoing. Guys, on the other hand, can be bad just for the power-hungry fun of it.

Freya kidnaps children from the lands she conquers and raises them to be ruthless warriors. One of them grows up to be Eric (Chris Hemsworth), the hunky Huntsman who helped Snow White vanquish Ravenna. That momentous victory is pretty much yada yada’ed in the middle of Winter’s War, which is mostly about the star-crossed, action-screwball romance between Eric and Sara (Jessica Chastain), a fellow child soldier.

The movie is most awkward when it tries to hybridise its bedtime-story, Disney-stamped DNA with the genetic stock of contemporary cable drama. Its ideal audience seems to be 12-year-olds who secretly watch Game of Thrones and Outlander, or maybe their parents. There is not as much blood and skin on display here, of course, but the movie seems desperate for the grown-up credibility that hints of sex and gore might offer. The dwarves (Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach) supply touches of pseudo-naughty humour. Poor Chastain and Hemsworth must spar and swear their love in Scottish accents straight from the Groundskeeper Willie Academy of Dialect Sciences. “Yer a right galoot,” Sara says to Eric.

She also stares stonily into that galoot’s eyes and says, “I’ve done terrible things.” Yes, but Chastain has also done Zero Dark Thirty and The Help and The Tree of Life, so there’s no need for her to be so hard on herself. But there’s also no need for anyone to keep trying to spin beloved fairy tales into second-rate franchises.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) because it wants to be taken seriously, I guess.

Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. — The New York Times