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For every good motion picture remake out there, there are 10 bad ones; for every justifiable remake, a hundred that are ill-conceived. “The Women” does nothing to improve the ratio.

“The Women” is, of course, based on the famous 1936 play by the very clever Clare Boothe Luce and the beloved 1939 MGM screen adaptation (co-written, in a weird homophonic coincidence, by the even cleverer Anita Loos). The original starred Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine and Marjorie Main, a pretty intimidating gang; but the new version has Meg Ryan, Eva Mendes, Annette Bening and Bette Midler in place of the first four of these — which is not so shabby either. (I haven’t seen the 1956 version, in which June Allyson, Joan Collins, Delores Gray and Agnes Moorhead stepped into these roles; but the very fact that it introduced male performers — most prominently Leslie Nielsen! — into the previously all-female cast sounds like a deal-breaker.)

Luce’s play was particularly tied to its times, filled with what the author may well have considered eternal verities about romance, sex, marriage, and women’s roles in society. It’s impossible to deny that vast — if yet incomplete — advancements have been made in the last seven decades.

Thanks to these wholesale changes in the culture, “The Women” is either ripe for remaking ... or utterly impossible to reconcile with contemporary life; the idea is either inspired or doomed.

Writer/director Diane English — best known for creating “Murphy Brown” — has made sweeping changes to the characters, while preserving the major basic plot elements.

As in the original, naive, upper-class Mary Haines (Ryan) thinks her marriage to businessman Stephen is as perfect as the rest of her life ... until she discovers that hubby has been stepping out with trashy golddigger Crystal Allen (Mendes). She’s shattered, but her mother (Bergen) counsels patience, much to the shock of Mary’s friends — Edie (Debra Messing), Alex (Jada Pinkett Smith), and magazine editor Sylvie (Bening). (Just for trivia’s sake, let’s note that Ryan has played Bergen’s daughter before, in her screen debut, the 1981 “Rich and Famous” — the last film made by George Cukor, who also directed ... the original version of “The Women”!)

Luce’s plot was basically a serviceable edifice on which to hang a series of witticisms, and English hasn’t added much in the way of rigorous structure. Aside from the updating, her main change has been to shift focus toward Mary’s friendship with Sylvie, who betrays her. It’s pretty clear by the end that English considers sisterhood to be a more important theme than marriage.

If this had been released two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been as distracted trying to force it into a political allegory. The moment I saw Mendes, I thought, “Sarah Palin!”... influencing Stephen (the electorate?) against his best interests (Mary, the Democratic Party), who must reconcile with Sylvie (Hillary Clinton) after a betrayal. Or something.

There’s probably nowhere to go with that.

English’s attempts to fit “The Women” into a modern setting are intelligent, but that, unfortunately, does not suffice, because the film is so limp in so many other ways. It fails, not so much in concept as in execution. While roughly 20 minutes shorter than Cukor’s take, it suffers from poky pacing, both in the overall forward movement and in the timing within scenes. English’s dialogue simply isn’t as clever; the first of my handful of chortles wasn’t provoked until nearly a half-hour in. Some lines are arch — “What do you think this is,” Ryan asks Bergen, “some kind of ’30s movie?” Others simply don’t sound like human speech — Bening is forced to mouth the awkward “You’ve not been there?” where an actual person would have said “You haven’t been there?”

Bits from the earlier versions occasionally pop up, but none too effectively. Viewers with an attachment to Cukor’s film will be disappointed by the disappearance of the long sequence at the Reno divorce ranch. Here it’s shortened to a five-minute segment at some sort of New Age retreat, with Mary Boland’s Countess (“Oh, l’amour, l’amour!”) well reincarnated in Bette Midler as a Sue Mengers-esque Hollywood agent. Midler is perfect, but blink and you might miss her.

Technically ... well, the whole thing looks flat (at best) and sometimes downright ugly. And the usually reliable Mark Isham provides a bland score that would be right at home in a James L. Brooks film, and, boy, do I not mean that in a good way.