TIM Burton does not seek to ape the original. Instead he calls his 2001 Planet Of The Apes a "re-imagining of the ape planet idea", inspired as much by Pierre Boulle's novel as the five films and the teatime television series of the 1970s.

He took the same approach with Batman, only that time with bags more buzz from Burton, making Gotham City his own psychological playground. The essential difference is one of history. There had never been a great Batman movie; Franklin Schaffner's Planet Of The Apes, on the other hand, was one of the films of the 1960s.

In 1968, Planet Of The Apes was as much a comment on its political times as it was a work of science fiction. Alas, the 2001 version is merely a comment on the vacuous state of mainstream Hollywood - it is a re-imaging rather than a re-imagining. Burton has all the trappings - and traps - of the modern blockbuster: the $100 million budget; the special effects; the battle scenes that mirror the thrill of a funfair ride; the stiff, banal dialogue and the empty spectacle.

Former rap pin-up Mark Wahlberg steps into Charlton Heston's astronaut boots as the spaceman who travels through space and time, crashing on to a planet that looks like Earth but is ruled by the apes. Humans, unwashed and unloved, are their slaves for use and abuse.

Like the Daleks in Dr Who, with their inability to climb stairs, these apes have a design fault: an aversion to entering water.

Wahlberg's Leo Davidson, cocky loose cannon of the US Air Force, teams up with free-thinking ape princess Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) to fight the tyrannical rule of fascist General Thade (Tim Roth) to free the repressed humans.

On the surface, the new movie's message is still anti-war, anti-slavery and, above all, anti-racist, but the old clout is missing, replaced by laboured clich. Instead the talking points will be, firstly, the improvement in ape suits, facial features and expressions - here is a less simple simian visually - and, secondly, Walberg's inability to match the heroic inspirational leadership qualities of Heston in 1968.

Roth reprises his baddie act from Rob Roy without the one-liners; Bonham Carter looks and sounds a strange fusion of Bubbles and an earlier refit of his owner, Michael Jackson, meanwhile Charlton Heston says hello, waves goodbye in the briefest of cameos as Thade's dying father, one of the knowing moments that Burton enjoys inserting.

However, as with his 'B'-movie spoof Mars Attacks!, the jokes fall flat; a case of Planet Of No Japes.

Most disappointingly of all, Burton adds nothing to the '68 model, despite this latter-day Hans Christian Andersen having the chance to add to his portfolio of outcasts and outsiders, his speciality act. Planet Of The Apes is his least individual film; it serves no purpose.

The prime fault is the script; Hollywood dialogue is at such a low perhaps we really could let the monkeys loose on the typewriters. They surely couldn't do worse.