THE In-Laws is sinfully unoriginal. It is the laziest of movies, a re-make that replaces Andrew Fleming's 1979 odd-couple pairing of Alan Arkin and Peter Falk with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas, neither odd nor a natural comic couple.

Hollywood has passed this way all too often, as the smart, dangerous, urbane guy, usually Robert De Niro over-egging the broad comedy, rubs shoulders with a neurotic, straight type, maybe Billy Crystal in Analyze This or anyone who stands in Bobby's way in Meet The Parents.

Albert Brooks, a more thick-set, less shrill Woody Allen, has the screwed-up Jewish doctor role. He is Jerry, a foot specialist, and pedant to boot, whose uptight demeanour, bum bag and phobias mark him out as the buffoon butt of the lame, telegraphed jokes that lie head.

His daughter (the utterly forgettable Lindsay Sloane) is to marry a dullard (the already forgotten Ryan Reynolds), a union whose fractious planning will require Jerry to cope with the mysterious, elusive, and sleek Steve Tobias (Douglas).

Tobias claims to be a photocopier salesman but his suits and travel arrangements suggest otherwise as he drags the reluctant Jerry into his world of espionage and intrigue and into the arms of David Suchet's suave, if mad, bisexual French smuggler.

Lemmon and Matthau the leads are not. Douglas suits heavier work, loners, cheats, action men. He lacks the light touch for comedy, flattening joke after joke, while the normally reliable, deadpan Brooks flounders under the dead weight of Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon's one-paced dialogue, being enervated where he should be agitated.

The spy movie satire is stale, the wedding-plan farce dreary, and the homilies about appreciating family and living life to the full are desperately cheesy. As in so many families, The In-Laws should be avoided.

Updated: 10:41 Friday, July 11, 2003