There have been worse movies than The Nutcracker in 3D. Certainly films made with less ambition, with less skilled actors and more modest sets and effects budgets. But it’s genuinely challenging to recall a more wrong-headed film than Andrei Konchalovsky’s convoluted, frankly baffling re-imagining of a beloved children’s story and ballet.

For all its popularity and name-recognition, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a bit light on plot. All the incident is front-loaded to the first half. A girl receives a nutcracker as a Christmas gift. She brings him to life, so he can do battle with the Rat King that enslaved him, and then they return to his fantasy kingdom. The entire second half is just fairies celebrating the Nutcracker’s return. Pretty anti-climactic.

Obviously, anyone wanting to turn the story into a traditional children’s film would have to rework it. But Konchalovsky’s decision to turn the story into a WWII analogy, and to fill the second half with sci-fi/fantasy chase sequences was clearly not the best strategy. (Also, his decision to rework Tchaikovsky’s iconic Nutcracker themes into cheesy musical numbers…more on that later…)

The basic story of The Nutcracker has thus been twisted into this inane sub-Bruckheimer pumped-up fantasy epic about an evil fascist Rat City and the prince, who has been magically transformed into a Nutcracker, that must retake human form and a human rebellion against the rats.

So I’m standing next to director Andrei Konchalovsky in a walk-in freezer known as the “VodBox,” dedicated to housing dozens of high-end vodkas. We’re all wearing fur coats and somewhat-ridiculous-even-in-frigid-temperatures fur hats.

We’re ostensibly here to discuss Konchalovsky’s latest film, a 3D imagining of The Nutcracker starring Elle Fanning and Nathan Lane, but for now, we’re sampling vodkas. And hoping no one from PETA shows up.

After tasting Konchalovsky’s first selection – a surprisingly smooth shot of “Beluga Noble Russian Vodka” – the director announces he’s done with his VodBox experience. “I’m from Russia…I’ve had enough of the cold!”

It makes sense to me when he says it, but after he leaves, I realize it doesn’t make much sense at all. Shouldn’t a Russian be able to withstand cold temperatures for longer than the rest of us short-sleeved LA weenies?