Old Dogs ( * )

November 25, 2009 4:00 p.m. EST

88 minutes

In theaters November 25, 2009

Rating: PG, Comedy

Guess they couldn't teach Old Dogs any new tricks. Because they're nowhere to be found in this fecklessly formulaic buddy romp. And even its old tricks stink up the joint.

Old Dogs (originally titled Old Dads), a very broadly written and acted comedy about reluctant fatherhood, is the kind of movie that gives movies a bad name. It seems manufactured by machine, thrown together without thought or plan, and constructed cynically for an undiscriminating audience.

Notwithstanding the timing of its opening, giving thanks for this one won't be easy.

Robin Williams and John Travolta play Dan and Charlie, respectively, lifelong friends and sports-marketing business partners on the brink of landing the biggest client they've ever had, a Japanese company, for their New York firm.

Unmarried Dan is downbeat, levelheaded, and lonely; good-time Charlie is his womanizing, twice-divorced, upbeat buddy.

Dan learns from a woman with whom he had a one-night stand seven years ago (well, no, it was actually an annulled quickie marriage), played by Kelly Preston (Mrs. Travolta in real life), that he's the father of seven-year-old fraternal twins, a girl (Travolta and Preston's daughter, Ella Bleu) and a boy (Conner Rayburn). She asks whether he would mind watching them for a few weeks while she does a prison stint for political protesting.

Dan responsibly agrees, but because he lives in an "adults only" community, the kids and "dads" are forced to stay at Charlie's, not the world's most child-friendly environment.

So Dan and Charlie become caregivers and take charge of the twins, recruiting their protege and assistant Ralph, played by Seth Green, to help them out.

They also encounter cameoing Matt Dillon as a camp director and Justin Long as a troop leader who take the kids camping, Bernie Mac (in his last film -- the release date was changed because of his death) as a children's entertainer, as well as Ann-Margret as a grief counselor, Lori Loughlin as a grieving translator, Rita Wilson as a cross-eyed hand model (!), Amy Sedaris as a neighbor, and Luiz Guzman and Dax Shepard as child-proofers.

This may be the most underachieving comic ensemble in the western hemisphere, for which director Walt Becker gets nearly all the blame. You know you're in trouble when you find yourself feeling sorry for the performers.

For a movie about fathers or even father figures, there's curiously little in the way of father-child bonding. Instead, the set-piece bits follow one another like floats in a parade, with nothing in the way of connective narrative tissue or internal logic to tie them together. It's as if each scene is its own movie, and none of them works.

Most of the humor is strained and strident, as if aimed at an audience that has had its collective sense of humor surgically removed. Not just guffaws but chuckles are nowhere to be heard, contrivances spring up like weeds, and several tasteless, racially insensitive subplots will make grownups cringe.

Director Becker (Wild Hogs, Van Wilder) works from a dreadful script by David Diamond and David Weissman, who have thrown everything they could think of against the wall to see what sticks. Answer: hardly anything.

And as unfunny as the comic "highlights" are, the false sentiment that's paraded out self-consciously in the film's serious moments is even worse.

You can see Williams and Travolta improvising -- perhaps they read the script and knew they were in big trouble. Perhaps understandably, they and everyone else in the cast tries too hard. Becker, on the other hand, doesn't try enough. This lame outing makes his mediocre Wild Hogs seem understated and sophisticated by comparison.

Tired, uninspired, and not even fitfully fetching, Old Dogs insults even the young pups in the audience. Where's that pooper scooper when we really need it?