The film is set on Coney Island in some fantasy version of the 1950s; the exterior locations look lovely but the apartment that Ginny (Winslet) shares with second husband Humpty (Belushi) and her son from her first marriage (Jack Gore), who is a budding pyromaniac, looks like a set from a high school play with a painted backdrop of the Coney Island boardwalk behind it. Ginny is, of course, miserable: a former actress, she now toils in a boardwalk clamhouse while the unambitious recovering alcoholic Humpty runs the carousel and fishes for their supper off a nearby pier. The only light in Ginny’s life is Mickey (Timberlake), a lifeguard and would-be intellectual playwright whom Ginny is getting busy with. That bit of clickbait aside, all this is pretty much drawn from the standard Allen morality play template; what’s particularly shocking is how ineptly it’s all presented. While Vittorio Storaro paints the movie in beautiful, gleaming colors (lots of red and deep blue), he is also victim to the seeming indifference Allen is showing to his own material: the camera follows the actors around Ginny and Humpty’s cramped apartment like a helpless child, unsure of where to stop and finally just hanging there while the cast spouts its leaden chunks of dialogue. Perhaps this is supposed to be meta, staged and performed purposely like the kind of bad play that Mickey would probably write if he ever got around to it? That’s giving Allen too much credit, in all likelihood. And Timberlake, who’s been pretty good in smaller roles in other movies, doesn’t have nearly the talent to pull off anything more complicated than getting his lines out, most of them nonsense about Eugene O’Neill anyway. Belushi comes across as a parody of a Brooklyn working class schmoe (making a credible Andrew Dice Clay in Blue Jasmine look like Marlon Brando) while Winslet’s shrieking, semi-permanently hysterical Ginny is not only exhausting but ultimately demeaning to both the actress and working women in general (I lost count of the times she whined that her head was “throbbing” or “cracking open”). Wonder Wheel is out in theaters today (Dec. 1).