The charmless sequel to the live-action version of Disney's most charming animated feature (itself taken from Dodie Smith's lovely little novel "The Hundred and One Dalmatians") gets underway when imprisoned fur fetishist Cruella is conditioned, à la Alex in "A Clockwork Orange," to be revolted by her former craving. Paroled, she devotes her fortune to saving a London dog shelter on the verge of foreclosure. Her parole officer, a bland young thing played by Alice Evans, has, as it turns out, a litter of Dalmatian pups sired by one of the dogs Cruella attempted to turn into a fur coat in the previous installment.

Of course, Cruella's cure proves temporary, she goes back to her "dognapping in the name of couture" ways, she targets the Dalmatian pups as her new raw material and the bland parole officer finds an equally bland mate, Ioan Gruffudd, in the young fellow who runs the shelter saved by Cruella's forbearance.

Other performers show up -- Eric Idle as the voice of a hectoring parrot who thinks he's a dog and Gérard Depardieu as the fur-mad French designer Cruella hires to realize her dog-coat masterpiece. (Depardieu makes a great entrance on the fashion runway, his massive body swathed in a furry he-man top, his tree-trunk legs barely draped by a leopard-skin kilt, with a leopard's head functioning as codpiece. It's quite a look -- for a second, Depardieu is the swish Conan.) But though the members of the cast manage to stay in character, it's a wonder they don't cower from Close as much as the pooches do.

Close got all sorts of praise for the first movie. Is it because she's considered a "serious" actress playing daringly madcap? She did the same sort of grotesque overacting in "Cookie's Fortune" (though Robert Altman made sure she wasn't the whole show). There's no modulation, no peaks or valleys, in Close's performance -- she's like a trick-or-treater who jumps out of the bushes to scare you and thinks that it will be just as effective if she keeps jumping out of the same damn bush for 100 minutes.

Cruella De Vil has been a woman close to my heart since the first time I laid eyes on her in the animated original. Much of that is due to the wonderful Bette Lou Gerson, who provided the original Cruella's voice. And what a voice! A parody of Bette Davis' cyanide-laced remarks, Gerson used low tones and sudden swoops, and proffered the most insincere endearments, all at the pace of a mine car descending a mountain. If you can imagine a corn husk that someone smeared with sugar in an attempt to pass it off as a piece of molasses bread, you can imagine Gerson's voice.

That's a sort of subtlety that's beyond Close. This is the performance of someone who doesn't really respect or understand comedy. She thinks that the way to play comedy is to act funny -- the deadliest choice imaginable. There's no inner life to the character, nothing beyond a conceit. The cartoon Cruella was more three-dimensional.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics