“Chicago” barely qualifies as a movie—it’s a filmed presentation of a Broadway musical. Somewhere there’s a script (Bill Condon wrote it) and some characters (John C. Reilly plays one) but in the end it’s a series of loosely strung together numbers intending to insult the audience, sneeringly identifying it as a scandal-loving, celebrity-mad, indiscriminate horde. Choreographer Rob Marshall turns his directorial debut into a slavish homage to Bob Fosse but where Fosse had the good sense to surround non-dancer Roy Scheider in “All That Jazz” with Ann Reinking and Ben Vereen, Marshall surrounds non-dancer Renee Zellweger with the equally lead footed Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere and suddenly editor Martin Walsh is everyone’s best friend. It’s all a trick; none of it’s credible: you spend the entire film guessing where the dancing doubles are inserted (though the credits trumpet the fact that when you see the leads dance…they’re really dancing—which is the same as saying whatever beef is used in an all-beef hot dog really is all beef). There’s probably only about twenty minutes of actual dialogue and the material is so thin (two murderesses turn their crimes into a media circus in Chicago’s immoral twenties) that the film must depend on its musical staging to keep you interested; but even there you’re presented with an unoriginal patchwork of fantasy sequences (you’ve seen this kind of stuff on PBS’ “Great Performances” hundreds of times) intended to move character development along but in reality only stalls what little plot there is. The film is way overpopulated with songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and they’re relentlessly similar—loud, brassy and bearing very little of the sardonic wit and pointedness of their “Cabaret”. Let’s not even get started on the leads’ singing voices. With Taye Diggs (an direct imitation of Joel Grey in “Cabaret” and Ben Vereen in “All That Jazz”) and Queen Latifah, both of who seem out of place in this white-bread world. Somewhere in there is Chita Rivera. really dancing