Written and directed by “Donnie Darko” creator Richard Kelly, “Southland Tales” was greeted with walkouts and boos when it premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. But then again, so was Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” when it made its debut at Cannes in 1960. Antonioni’s film left the festival with the Prix Le Premier Regard and Mr. Kelly’s film departed the Croisette with a distributor. Bolstered by a new prologue, narration, and special effects, “Southland Tales” opens today in New York and Los Angeles, pared down from nearly three hours to a comparatively trim two hours and 24 minutes. If what you’ve been seeking is a movie depicting “Hostel” director Eli Roth seated on a toilet getting shot by a dwarf in a SWAT-team uniform, you need look no further than “Southland Tales.” What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty. A comedy without laughs, a science fiction film without wonder, a hate letter to Los Angeles without teeth, and an end-of-the-world movie whose on-screen explosions pale in comparison to its conceptual self-immolation, “Southland Tales” has retained something to impel anyone to the nearest exit. Overlong, overbearing, childish, unkind, pretentious, and inept to a degree hitherto unexplored in contemporary mainstream domestic filmmaking, it is the worst American movie of this century thus far.

“I have always been obsessed with this whole apocalypse thing,” Mr. Kelly has said in advance of the film’s release. If only his obsession extended to this whole narrative thing. The problem with reviewing a tale as grotesquely ill-told as “Southland Tales” is that to detail the incoherent vomiting of events, characters, and circumstances that Mr. Kelly has mistaken for a story is to perform an unpaid rewrite. It would be impossible to describe the experience of “Southland Tales” in any way that does justice to just how numbingly repetitive, embarrassingly desperate, and emotionally opaque its feeble cobbling of conspiracy, portent, genre clichés, and cultural critique is.

Nevertheless, here goes:

When a terrorist nuclear attack wipes out part of west Texas, Homeland Security’s resulting clampdown on civil liberties creates a new breed of politically motivated lawlessness. As Los Angeles approaches Independence Day 2008, the government, represented by Holmes Osborne and Miranda Richardson as Senator Frost and Mrs. Frost, an unaccountably all-powerful vice presidential candidate and his wife, wages a domestic war against Marxist terrorists (who seem very effective at recruiting female “Saturday Night Live” cast members and not much else) while a mysterious German corporation trumpets its ominous-looking offshore ocean energy plant as America’s environmental salvation.

Meanwhile, Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac action movie star, has co-written a screenplay with his porn-star and talk-show-host girlfriend Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that is either a prophetic vision of the end of times just around the corner or his potential directorial debut, depending on who’s babbling about it. In a bid either to do background research or jump-start Armageddon, Santaros does a ride-along with a Hermosa Beach cop named Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott). Though Roland has been manipulated into an ill-fated attempt to discredit the police by the neo-Marxists, he and the person who is either his brother, his double, or his temporal echo, are apparently the fuses that will set off the end of the world. Did I mention that Justin Timberlake appears as a disfigured Iraq War vet narrating from a gun emplacement above Venice Beach? My apologies.

The head scratching begins early in “Southland Tales” with a superimposed title declaring Mr. Kelly’s film as volume four of what is apparently a six-volume failed attempt at entertainment. Perhaps if one reads the three prior volumes, published in graphic-novel form, “Southland Tales” won’t all seem so depressingly empty and unimaginative. I doubt it. Unable to coherently organize his feelings and beliefs about the dehumanizing antiheroism of the unchecked rule of law, vacuous celebrity culture, faithless fatalism, and conscienceless corporate government, Mr. Kelly has instead made a film that is the thing it wants to satirize: a smug, uncaring, and chaotic pastiche of self-serving and ineffective ideas cobbled from dubious sources.

The degree to which Mr. Kelly leans on Robert Aldrich’s 1955 movie “Kiss Me Deadly” is indicative of the bone-dry creative crucible from which “Southland Tales” emerged. According to the online movie guide IMDB.com, Aldrich’s movie has been referenced or excerpted in some 20 other films, including during the climax of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

This fact does not deter Mr. Kelly from displaying two lengthy excerpts from “Kiss Me Deadly”: playing Nat King Coles’s performance of the theme song offscreen, and having Mr. Johnson exit a scene in the same distinctive two-seat roadster that Mike Hammer drove in the Aldrich film. There’s no spin, no payoff, no homage, no nothing. Just a witless cut and paste of a superior entertainment made by someone who, unlike Mr. Kelly, performed the storyteller’s due diligence of looking beyond movies into the darker universal truths of human psychology, history, art, and experience to create something eternally trenchant and beautiful.