D

It isn’t really fair to compare Andrew Fleming’s new version of “The In-Laws” to Andrew Bergman’s 1979 original. The earlier film was delightfully deadpan and genuinely funny, with absolutely splendid teamwork from old pros Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, who worked together like an accomplished old soft-shoe act. The present picture, in which Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks exhibit nowhere near the same sort of chemistry, is just a conventional contemporary buddy action-comedy in which the physical set-pieces outnumber the laughs. It’s a measure of just how far “The In-Laws” has fallen in this retelling that one of the biggest sight gags involves poor Brooks climbing out of a hot tub wearing an ultra-skimpy bathing suit that reveals more of his derrière than anyone but his wife should ever have seen. A quarter-century ago, happily, Arkin wasn’t compelled to demean himself in this way. But that now seems a lost age, a time in American movies when cleverness was prized over in-your-face grossness.

About all that Fleming’s movie, scripted by Nat Mauldin (who rewrote “Doctor Doolittle” for Eddie Murphy) and Ed Solomon (of the “Bill and Ted” and “Men in Black” pictures), shares with its predecessor is the premise: the father of a bride-to-be finds himself dragged into a comically dangerous bit of espionage by his wacko counterpart on the groom’s side. But instead of the unlikely spy that Falk so brilliantly played (who can forget his hilariously weird anecdote about babies being carried off by huge tsetse flies?), Douglas’ Steve Tobias is just slick, super-cool James Bond type; Brooks’s Jerry Peyser, meanwhile, is a hyper-rigid podiatrist rather than the dour dentist Arkin played. One of the flaws in the refashioning is that it makes clear all too soon that Tobias really is a US agent (the matter was finessed much more subtly in the earlier edition); another is that the scheme that Tobias involves Peyser in–a plot to undermine an international smuggler trying to buy a submarine–just isn’t funny, especially when compared to the bizarre counterfeiting business from the first film. Of course, Bergman’s picture was blessed by the presence of the inspired Richard Libertini as the villain, a nutbag Castro wannabe with a hand-puppet obsession. Here the bad guy is played by David Suchet, a good actor to be sure, but not good enough to get any comic mileage out of the clichéd figure of an effete Frenchman who takes a thoroughly implausible sexual interest in the grumpy doctor. Things aren’t helped by providing Tobias with a distaff partner (Robin Tunney) and a shrewish ex-wife (Candice Bergin, most of whose laughs are supposed to derive from her salty, Murphy Brown-style mouth), or by devoting entirely too much time to the colorless newlyweds-to-be (Ryan Reynolds and Lindsay Sloane). And as for Russell Andrews as the stumblebum FBI agent in pursuit of the supposed rogue Tobias, the only thing faintly amusing about him is that his character has the name (Will Hutchins) of the actor who once played “Sugarfoot” on ABC (it was a Warner Brothers production, too). (Query: Is that intentional homage or just lazy screenwriting?) Technically the picture is mediocre, with little made of the supposed Chicago setting. And for the record this flick may be remembered one of the earliest, if not the very first, to take a jab at the Homeland Security apparatus, though the send-up is limited to a single limp line when a wayward submarine makes its way to the coast of Lake Michigan. (The big finale in which the boat is destroyed by our now-buddy heroes provides the concluding explosion for a movie that’s been convincingly bomb-like all along.)

“The In-Laws” is just another example of a great old film manhandled in the remaking, as sorry in its way as the dismal retread of “The Out-of-Towners” with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn was back in 1999. The best advice to viewers with an inclination to check it out is to take evasive action–serpentine, serpentine! (Just another of the original’s wonderful moments that’s jettisoned this time around.)