Courtesy of IMDb

If you had 12 camera crews, 20 days and $40 million, who is the most boring, important person you could leech off of?

We got to the theater around 7 p.m., and instead of choosing to see “Mercy,” “Send Help,” “Iron Lung” or any sensible pick, we booked two backrow tickets to a 7:05 p.m. showing of “Melania.” The film — if you can call it that — is an obscenely expensive vlog-style nightmare following the eponymous first lady’s meaningless errands leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration as President of the United States.

Please do not see “Melania,” even as a joke. Imagining how bad the movie could be was, in all ways, more enjoyable than sitting through Brett Ratner’s tawdry horror show of boredom.

Watching paint dry would have been infinitely more enthralling than seeing Melania Trump pick out different champagne glasses and opulent tablecloths. She’s totally meandering and pointless.

“Melania” clawed in $7 million in its opening box office weekend against its roughly $80 million production and advertising budget, failing to overshadow the 3 million pages of Epstein files released the same day. To much conservative chagrin, that $73 million difference is probably long gone — most likely tied up in some secret Swiss bank account or congressional drug-smuggling operation — and we still care about the Epstein files more than wretched Melania.

There are no stakes in “Melania” — no foes, resistance or any kind of narrative at all. Just two hours of the first lady doing pretend-business with the nation’s top placaters. About half of the movie involves her boasting toddler-grade, gold-oriented interior design skills with people dressing her Barbie Dreamhouse style.

Melania makes a humble offhand comment about film cameras and memories at the beginning, which becomes the movie’s only visual motif. Every 30 seconds the editor slaps film grain and tape noise over the footage to make it look … homemade? Personable? I really feel for the troglodyte chained up in the editing room who was fed nothing but Valium and bread crusts during the editing of this film.

Two guys packed up and left the theater after 15 minutes and one kid started snoring. The guy next to us took a phone call and, by that point, I was completely tuned out and could only hear the rumbling explosions from the theater next door. Nobody was invested. Not even the red-hatted patriots or grossly cynical Marxists in attendance could muster anything but a whimpered spirit and a $15-lighter wallet.

“OK, this is kinda more boring than I thought it would be,” a dad with three kids in the first row murmured. Even diehard Melania fans might struggle through the runtime-padding travel scenes.

In a desperate bid to appear like a relatable supervillain, she comes off as off-putting and overly pretentious, displaying zero recognizable facial expressions other than bitter constipation. Her performance dances just under the line of sub-par and shows little emotional connection to anything but her ridiculous hat, offering no real insight into her place in the political foyer.

For a film about the everyday life of a politician’s wife, it tries its absolute hardest to mention absolutely nothing about politics. Even when “Melania” does reluctantly mention immigration, Hamas or Baron Trump’s freakish height, it’s only to spew one-sided propaganda and elevate Melania as a saint amongst the poor, misguided children of the world, who would likely struggle to appreciate the 55-year-old multi-millionaire’s hard work of party hopping.

The most fascinating scene in “Melania” comes right after the inauguration, in the White House, where Trump is distantly rambling to himself while meandering between dark rooms and hallways. He eventually emerges to call his wife “very difficult” before going to sleep with two miniature cans of presumably very hard liquor.

The movie ends with an epilepsy-inducing photoshoot followed by a smattering of forced applause from maybe half the theater. It then swung, abruptly, into a humble slideshow praising Melania’s various philanthropic feats.

Very little information is available regarding the production of “Melania.” It seems to have popped up viciously and with little reason to exist beyond being a quick polarization scheme. Apparently, Brett Ratner, Jeff Bezos, Melania Trump and the late Jeffrey Epstein thought the American public were a bunch of easily fleeced buffoons.

At its best, “Melania” is a surprisingly, maybe unintentionally, raw view into the excess and disconnect plaguing American politics. At its worst, this migraine-inducing puff piece about America’s first lady will have you pulling your hair out in utter boredom.