Review: Annie

City Paper grade: B-

You could make a good case that Will Gluck’s modernized remake of the 1978 Broadway musical, is a better movie than John Huston’s 1982 film version, which has the gilded hollowness of a stage-to-film transfer for which the answer to every question is “make it bigger.” Turning Daddy Warbucks from a war profiteer into a cell-phone magnate named Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx) is a canny move, and it turns out foster care can offer just as many cartoon horrors as a Depression-era orphanage. But if Gluck’s Annie is a better movie, or at least one more nattily tailored to the screen, Huston’s is a better Annie movie, which is to say, one considerably less embarrassed about its musical origins.

The opening scene, in which a brassy, curly-haired redhead is told to quiet down so Quevenzhané Wallis’ Annie can take her place, recalls those ’80s music videos where heavy metal bands busted into the living rooms of uptight squares, signaling a movie that’s on the defensive from the get-go. Dance numbers are out — didn’t Jay-Z co-produce this thing? — replaced by some half-hearted hip-shakes, and the singers’ voices are Auto-Tuned to death and then buried in the sound mix. (Surely either one negates the need for the other.) New songs by Sia and Greg Kurstin have the flavor of Oasis B-sides (not entirely a bad thing), and Bobby Cannavale brings much-needed flair to the role of a morally compromised political operative (you don’t say) who is helping Stacks run for mayor.

But Cameron Diaz’s Miss (or is it Ms.?) Hannigan doesn’t come close to eclipsing Carol Burnett’s — the one truly great thing about the original movie — and Rose Byrne, as Stacks’ workaholic right-hand woman, is as amiably flavorless as a bread sandwich. Truth be told, neither Annie is particularly good, but at least one conveys a sense of why they’d want to make the movie in the first place.