Although being released during the Thanksgiving holiday, Yours, Mine & Ours sure doesn't offer anything to be thankful about.

One of my complaints about mainstream cinema today is how audiences tend to ignore a picture of true class and intelligence (consider the sparse box office reception for North Country), yet when studios release, say, a comedy that's a carbon copy of similar films people have seen many times over, moviegoers flock to it in droves.

For example, audiences chose to make Cheaper by the Dozen a blockbuster during the Christmas season two years ago, leaving the energetic and visually gorgeous Peter Pan remake in the dust, and I have a feeling lightning will strike twice with Yours, Mine & Ours, a remake of the rather sweet and affectionate Lucille Ball/Henry Fonda team-up from 1968. (Jon Favreau's rollicking space adventure Zathura is already being creamed by Chicken Little and Harry Potter 4).

Yours, Mine & Ours is the epitome of cinematic mindlessness, its very existence proving how the general moviegoing public is viewed by some filmmakers as a sea of rubes who'll laugh at anything put in front of them. Like its predecessor, Yours, Mine & Ours uses as its basis a real-life story. Frank Beardsley (Dennis Quaid) is a stern Coast Guard admiral (he was a Navy man in the original) as well as a widower with eight kids to take care of. Helen North (Rene Russo) is a free-spirited artist with a whopping ten kids of her own, six of them adopted (although I believe the real Helen's ten were all her own).

These two were sweethearts in high school before parting ways, but then they meet again one fateful day, when Frank's latest assignment brings his clan to town. Helen and Frank get to talking, and before you know it, the two have gotten hitched. This comes as dreadful news to both sets of kids, who despise the thought of having to live in a house filled with a grand total of twenty people. As Helen and Frank try to make their marriage work amidst the chaos of raising eighteen children, the kiddies devise a plan to get some peace and quiet by doing everything in their power to break up their parents' relationship.

Yeah, doesn't the thought of eighteen malicious little brats doing whatever they can to drive a couple to divorce strike you as knee-slappingly funny?

1968's Yours, Mine & Ours has always been somewhat  special for me. While I was growing up, my dad kept telling me how we were related to the real Frank Beardsley (a cousin of my grandma's on my dad's side, I think), and although I never sat down and watched the movie itself until a few years ago, I found it to be a goodhearted comedy that focused on one untraditional family trying the best they could to make living together work for them. 

The difference between the original Yours, Mine & Ours and this one involves the execution; the first one focused on the family's efforts to function despite their huge size, while the remake dishes out a sitcommy plot resembling Are We There Yet? combined with Cheaper by the Dozen. It's derivative, unoriginal entertainment of the lowest order, afraid to do anything with the material other than chew it up and regurgitate it into a 90-minute stream of false emotions and lame slapstick pratfalls. 

For some insane reason, instead of developing the story into an updated version of the same sweet tale, director Raja Gosnell (the man behind Big Momma's House and the Scooby-Doo movies, which should be sending up many red flags right about now) chooses to transform the plot into a souped-up Home Alone sequel, with Dennis Quaid being covered in some form of gunk or clobbered by something heavy every five minutes and the kids reaching outrageous levels to split up Frank and Helen. One can imagine Damien from The Omen going, "Now that's just mean." All of the joy and life has been sucked out of the plot, and what remains is a movie rushed into production in order to hoard some cash before Cheaper by the Dozen 2 comes along. 

I like Quaid and Russo. I really do. Quaid's a good, charismatic actor, and Russo brings charm to even the tiniest of roles (see Two for the Money). But their talents and collective ambition aren't enough to redeem this boneheaded flick. Their characters lack chemistry, personality and effort. The youngsters in this movie are even worse off, since no one is allowed to bloom individually. All of them end up being swept into an irritating collective, driven by bickering and their self-absorbed attempts to break up their parents. They can't stop whining for two seconds and try to get along with each other.

Yours, Mine & Ours is a dull, unappealing, shallow, garish, and overdone movie, devoid of a single moment of happiness, each frame dedicated to assaulting the audience with trite jokes. It's just flat-out pathetic.

MY RATING: * (out of ****)

(Released by Columbia Pictures and rated "PG" for some mild crude humor.)