IT looked a laugh on paper casting David Duchovny, the serious alien-detecting FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder of The X-Files, in a comical alien-zapping role in Evolution.

Alas, the truth is out there on screen, and the awkward, evasive Duchovny is about as funny as foot and mouth in Ivan Reitman's messy amalgam of Ghostbusters, Men In Black and Independence Day.

Duchovny is Dr Ira Kane - not many Iras, are there, apart from lyricist Gershwin and novelist Levin - and this particular Ira is a disgraced Pentagon researcher licking his wounds teaching science at a college in Arizona where 'hard' and 'work' never meet.

When a meteor lands in the desert, the mild and mellow Ira and his fellow cynical professor, hyperactive geologist Harry Block (Orlando Jones, a bargain-bin Eddie Murphy) are quickly on the crater scene and this is no ordinary rock. Gunge is seeping through its surface; the cellular plankton, it turns out, of alien life forms far more advanced than Earth's creatures and faster developing than the Texas economy.

Naturally, Ira and Harry don't tell the authorities, preferring instead to test the micro-organisms in their lab.

If the aliens' rapid development from slugs to bugs to civilisation-threatening thugs in wing-sprouting lizards were not enough problem, there is also the inconvenience of the attentions of pompous Army officers; the state Governor (a cameo from Ghostbusters alumni Dan Aykroyd); and a clumsy petty-minded government epidemiologist (Julianne Moore, too good for such cheap laughs).

Reitman feels the need to reprise his Ghostbusters formula by adding a third member to the alien-busting task force, lumbering Duchovny and Jones with American Pie and Road Trip's Seann William Scott, a teen-movie version of Jim Carrey's imbecile act, here playing a nerd of a trainee fireman.

Reitman's anarchic sci-fi comedy adventure is a slapdash and shallow pastiche. It purloins big chunks of cheesy horror from superior sci-fi movies while pitching its humour in the low zone of the dumb and bad-taste market, displaying a childish fixation with getting to the bottom of things. Meanwhile, the special effects merely reprise assorted computer-generated monsters from the slaying fields of Jurassic Park and Deep Blue Sea to convey the meteoric rise of the voracious space invaders.

Evolution is cheap and cheerful, taking summer blockbuster cinema backwards not forwards. Time for revolution not Evolution.