How can a movie with Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito and Owen Wilsonnotbe funny? Watch “Haunted Mansion” and find out.

The live-action remake of the 2003 box office flop starring Eddie Murphy, based on one of Disneyland’s most popular attractions, is a rough experience. (The literal truth: In order to watch it, I had to contort myself into a semi-painful lotus position just so that I couldn’t get comfortable enough to fall asleep.)

Like a lot of movies — including lots of good ones — there’s no mystery as to how it will end. Rather, the film’s success or failure depends entirely on the journey, whether the characters are fun, the relationships interesting, and the action novel and imaginative. Unfortunately, none of that is the case here. “Haunted Mansion” brings together genuinely skilled and appealing comic actors and gives them little to do but mug.

At the center of the story is Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), who, in the first scene, meets the woman who will become his wife. Interestingly, this woman’s personality is defined almost entirely in terms of her love of junk food, and yet she doesn’t die of natural causes but in a car accident. This leaves Ben bereft, drinking heavily and working as a tour guide at a supposedly haunted site.

In these early moments, “Haunted Mansion” is at its best because the story hasn’t stagnated yet.

ThenOwen Wilsonshows up as a priest who hires Ben to inspect a haunted house, recently bought by a single mom (Rosario Dawson), and Haddish gets a couple of early laughs as a transparently fake medium, also hired to investigate the house. She fares better than DeVito, who plays a professor of the occult with his usual gusto but isn’t given a funny thing to do or say.

Eventually, all the main characters relocate to the haunted mansion, with the goal of expelling the 999 ghosts that are infesting the place, including the ghost leader known as the Hat-Box Ghost. The latter is played by Jared Leto, whose ambition as an actor seems to be to perform entire roles in a way that no one recognizes him. If you see his name in the credits and think, “Wait, was Jared Leto in this?” then he’s done his job.

一旦所有的角色都在家里,什么都没有can happen until the movie has been stretched to feature length. They can’t expel the ghost, because the movie would be over. They can’t form interesting relationships with each other, because the characters aren’t developed enough. No more than a third of the way into an overlong 122-minute running time, the story has completely come to a halt. The only way the movie can stretch things is through ghost skirmishes, minor ghost battles that eventually must lead to a big one at the finish. But the comic tone (not comedy literally, but a certain air of levity) prevents anything from being scary. So for the last 80 minutes, at least, nothing happens because nothingcanhappen.

演员很好- they were probably reassured by each other’s presence — but there was nothing they could do. The root problem is in the script by Katie Dippold (who was also behind 2016’s miscast “Ghostbusters”), and the second problem was directorJustinSimien’sdecision to go big with it.

“Haunted Mansion” shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com