You’re heard the expression “cover-your-eyes awful” or something near to that?

I understood the concept.

I had never lived it.

Until tonight … while watching the movie starring (and written by and directed by) Simon Helberg — Wolowitz, of TV’s successful Big Bang Theory.

About halfway through We’ll Never Have Paris, I literally was covering my eyes — from embarrassment for everyone on screen, and especially Helberg … and everyone sitting in that Abu Dhabi theater, Arabs, westerners and Filipinos … and Hollywood for allowing this movie to be made … and for the human race, which produced people capable of producing such a wretched flick and others dim enough to pay to see it.

In addition to covering my eyes, I was muttering “Please end! Please end! Please end!” as the movie floundered towards the finish line of 92 minutes.

What went wrong?

Where to begin.

–Let’s start with Simon Helberg as a romantic lead. Yes, Woody Allen has managed to pull off rom-coms with his nebbishy self as romantic leads, but Simon Helberg’s milquetoast “Quinn” character makes Woody seem like a decisive, take-charge, neurosis-free lady-killer.

–None of us should ever had to see Simon Helberg with his shirt off. He managed to do that several times in this movie. A brave actor? A cruel one?

–A series of thoroughly unbelievable plot developments. Women like Melanie Lynskey (best known as the stalker “Rose” in Two and a Half Men) and Maggie Grace competing for the whiny, tremulous Quinn; Zachary Quinto as a fabulous best friend Who Understands Women and always opens his door to the ridiculous, self-obsessed Quinn.

–Another ridiculous plot point: Quinn can’t stop himself from sharing that he is having sex with other women. He tends to mention it whenever he is about to propose marriage. Some men are lame, but that lame?

–Helberg’s acting. He acts and sounds a lot — a lot — like Big Bang’s Wolowitz. A different haircut, no shirt instead of one on top of another on top of another, a musician instead of an engineer … but it is the same nervous, twitchy, motormouth he plays on Big Bang.

–The title. If you are going to riff, awkwardly, on a famous line from one of the greatest movies ever made, you better have a good movie. A very good movie. This is nowhere near good. This doesn’t even sniff good.

–Not enough Paris. They get there, eventually, but the city is a throwaway reference, really. The interior scenes “set” there … hard to imagine they were shot anywhere but SoCal.

Bad dialogue, improbable scenes, awkward moments … and a sense that maybe sitcom actors are overpaid if Simon Helberg can get that movie made and distributed — and all the way to the UAE.

This movie is so bad I likely will remember it for a long time. Simon Helberg succeeded in that, if nothing else.