In 1978 Warren Beatty wrote, directed and starred in a re-make of Ernst Lubitsch's charming 1943 trip to heaven and hell, Heaven Can Wait. Both films were nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture.

In 2001, annoying American stand-up Chris Rick writes, executive-produces and gives himself his first lead role in another re-visit to Heaven Can Wait. Down To Earth will not be troubling the Academy come the award season.

Beatty, you might recall, played a football star who arrives in heaven ahead of his time after a car accident. He is allowed to return but only in the body of another man. Rock passes on the football bit but otherwise the basic premise remains the same.

He casts himself as Lance Barton, a bike messenger and unsuccessful comic with suits as loud as his manner, whose only hit of a particularly bad audition night is his fatal contact with a truck. At heaven's gates, boss angel Mr King (Chazz Palminteri) and his lovely assistant Mr Keyes (Eugene Levy) agree to send him back to earth and assign him a replacement body totally different from his own: one Charles Wellington, America's 15th wealthiest man, who is also fat, old and... white. Rock's Barton is skint, skinny, young and... black.

Just when you pray you will be seeing less of the raucous Rock and more of the fat guy, it becomes clear you will be lumped with watching the loudmouth inside and only occasional reminders of what everyone else around him is seeing. This is one big ego trip without the redeeming flexibility and make-up miracles of Eddie Murphy in his Nutty Professor movies.

Rock needs better material and so, alas, does York actor Mark Addy, a Yorkshireman here playing a butler, who is really a rap-loving American from Scarsdale but feels the need to pretend to be a gentleman's gentleman from London, plummy Fulham accent, delicate footsteps and all. Confused? Well, it probably sounded a funny idea to Rock but he never comes up with the lines for the former Full Monty star. Addy fans should wait for his next movie, A Knight's Tale, already a hit in the United States and on its way to Britain this summer. Down To Earth, meanwhile, hits Rock bottom.