In “Alfie,” Jude Law doesn’t break down the fourth wall so much as he seduces it, sleeps with it and hurries it out the door with taxi fare.

Preening like a girl on prom night, the star of “Cold Mountain” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” gives the sort of smirking, self-regarding performance that one feels immediately obliged to forget, like a liquor-stained one night stand.

Though he can hardly be singly faulted, Law finds himself complicit in the latest ill-conceived remake of a classic Michael Caine movie (see “Get Carter”).

Reprising Caine’s role from the 1966 playboy tragedy of the same name, Law plays Alfie Elkins, a womanizing British limo driver so preternaturally vain, he can’t resist peering into the camera and addressing the audience directly.

Thus, we’re essentially held hostage while Alfie bombards us with sartorial wisdom (“If you ooze masculinity, you don’t have to be afraid of pink”) and dating tips (“When it comes to shagging birds, it’s all about location, location, location”).
Cheerfully shallow — he dismisses one lover as “not having the superficial things that really matter” — Alfie gorges himself on a revolving buffet of Manhattan socialites and party-girls while simultaneously dating a long-suffering single mother (Marisa Tomei) who desperately clings to the belief that Alfie, deep down, is a real saint.

Director Charles Shyer (“Baby Boom”) and co-writer Elaine Pope evidently want to believe it, too — even when Alfie is bedding his best friend’s girl (Nia Long), he seems victimized, like some unfortunate space alien dropped into New York with powers of seduction that he can neither understand nor control.

What a bunch of steaming, metrosexual bunk.

Besides depriving the character of the worldly, menacing machismo that made Caine’s original portrayal so sad, realistic and good, this false veneer of naivete gives Alfie a laughably shallow learning curve.

“Maybe looks aren't everything,” Alfie says in a moment of clarity, genuinely shocked.

That’s it? Looks aren’t everything? As pearls of wisdom go, it’s not much to mount a movie around.

Predictably, Alfie goes looking for absolution, indebting the filmmakers to mechanically cycle through Law’s female co-stars for one more round of forgiveness and benighted soul searching.

“Think before unzipping,” one concerned friend helpfully counsels our hero, and what a perfect coda for “Alfie” — a carnal cautionary tale in billboard form.