Making its way into theaters two years after it was filmed, Penelope is a gender-switched “Beauty and the Beast” update that exudes an anxious cuteness but is finally neither amusing or appealing enough to be worth the obvious labor the filmmakers put into it.

In the title role, Christina Ricci is the daughter of a “blue blood” family. She is skilled in music, literary studies, horticulture and chess, talents acquired over a life in which she has almost never left the family’s mansion: Because of a curse levied on the family by a vengeful witch, she was born with a pig’s snout on her face. She can only be cured of this physiognomical problem if another blue blood proposes marriage, a consummation her parents (Richard E. Grant and Catherine O’Hara) have desperately been trying to arrange, with the help of a social register consultant.

All the high-society scions whom the consultant lines up flee in horror when Penelope presents herself. Might her prince and savior be Max (James McAvoy)? He’s a dissolute gambler, but there’s just something else going on there with him, isn’t there?

One of a reviewer’s occupational hazards is that his plot summaries are often more interesting than the movies under consideration. (The obverse is true of Shakespeare.) I tell you in all earnestness that, summary notwithstanding, Penelope is a ragged, misbegotten little mess.

First-time director Mark Palansky tries to goose the action by add-ins of screwball romantic comedy, some knockabout humor, a computer-assisted scene-setting that looks like down-market Tim Burton, and what seems to be an infusion from Rene Clair’s 1940s comedy, I Married a Witch. There’s even a recourse to the old disgraced-newsman-in-search-of-redemption story line. And none of it works any magic despite the best efforts of some skilled performers (especially O’Hara).

Reese Witherspoon turns up in a small role, and she’s listed as a producer. Perhaps she pried the movie loose from limbo. Another possible reason for its belated release is McAvoy’s recent appearance in the Oscar-nominated Atonement, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he considers this a skeleton in his closet.