When you’re looking for Carmen Miranda to save a movie, you know something’s really wrong with it.

I was hoping for a bit of that salvation from Miranda while watching Nancy Goes to Rio, a generally flat, dreary musical starring the famous Latin personality, along with Ann Sothern and Jane Powell. Try as she might, however, Miranda wasn’t able to salvage quality from the wreckage, and I ultimately had to turn the film off in frustration.

It wasn’t funny. The songs were poor. What more could you not want?

All kidding aside, I do like Miranda a lot; I just wished this movie was a little better … and that she was onscreen more often. She did liven the proceedings to a certain extent, but unfortunately she seemed to take a back seat to the blah storyline and uninteresting main characters played by Sothern and Powell.

My biggest concern with the flick, though, was the music, which was remarkably subpar. That includes the dreadful title number, a repetitious little ditty with a dull melody and weak lyrics. The other songs didn’t fare much better. In a musical, you just gotta have good tunes. There’s no way around that.

Needless to say, I won’t be watching the rest of this picture any time soon.