Klara and the Sun review: Jenna Ortega plays an annoying robot in sci-fi slop

Running time: 116 minutes.Rated PG-13 (thematic elements, some violence, and strong language).

In theaters.Oh, look — another weird role for Jenna Ortega.Goodie.Or, rather, good grief.Whether she’s goth-ing it up in “Wednesday,” “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” or the upcoming execrable art-world satire “The Gallerist,” the Gen Z actress is firmly in the business of bizarre.

She is so odd so often, really, that her projects have slid into boring routine and predictability.Not to mention fakeness.That Ortega plays a quirky AI robot in Taika Waititi’s twee, cotton-candy, sci-fi groaner “Klara and the Sun” comes as no surprise at all.

It’s what she always does.Similarly, what has become apparent from this director’s lacking projects since the excellent “Jojo Rabbit” and “Thor: Ragnarok” is that forcing his dry and wacky sense of humor upon stories that don’t ask for it is what he always does.Their combined complacency results in an overworked, overacted and pesky drag that begs — begs! — us to giggle at and cry over odious characters as it ambles to the most obvious message imaginable: That the power of human love cannot be replicated in a lab.I dunno.I bet some determined scientists could get a lot closer than this dud does.     Ortega’s Klara is, naturally, not your average bot.

Although, in the grand scheme of android tales, she’s pretty meh.On sale at a cheap urban shop run by a sad manager (Natasha Lyonne), Klara prefers to stand on one leg and rebelliously break all the rules.

“Don’t be weird!,” the others implore her.Klara doesn’t listen — especially when she makes her irksome daily paeans to the sky.“Hello, Sun.Thank you for your healing ways and your infinite goodness,” she says in the film’s first few seconds.

Our response to such thick sap is to recoil much in the same way as when a blind date begins with, “Let me tell you about Bitcoin.” Klara — an outdated model of “artificial friend...