This movie from Callie Khouri, who wrote (and won an Oscar for) “Thelma & Louise,” back in 1991, tries to meld the old tradition of heist comedy with the light feminism of a flick like “Nine to Five” (1981). But “Mad Money” is neither clever nor engaging enough to work as a celebration of either larcenous cunning or womanly feistiness.

As in “Nine to Five,” the script by Glenn Gers involves a trio of gals. The ringleader is Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton), a zany upper-class Kansas City housewife whose investment advisor husband Dan (Ted Danson) has been out of a job so long that they’re about to lose their big suburban home and plush lifestyle. In desperation she goes to work, unhappily as a janitor, but fortuitously at the Federal Reserve Bank, where—among other things—paper currency ready to be taken out of circulation is regularly burned under the ever-watchful eye of the bank’s security-obsessed director, Glover (Stephen Root).

But Cardigan, though distracted and ditzy in that lovable Keaton way, perceives a chink in Glover’s procedures for disposing of the decommissioned cash, involving the way it’s transported to the burning room in locked carts. In order to take advantage of the flaw, though, she needs a couple of confederates in particular positions among the staff. And so she enlists Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah), who works in the burn room and, as a single mother with two young sons, needs extra cash for school tuition, and Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes), an easygoing but hyperactive cart-pusher who’s married to Bob (Adam Rothenberg), a likable doofus, and throws in with the others because—well, she’s living in a trailer and money is a nice thing to have.

I must confess that the precise strategy of diverting the money from the cart and getting it past security—it involves changing locks (or at least keys) and stuffing bills into the women’s clothes—eluded me; maybe I just dozed off during the explanations. As a result the inevitable sequence about the time when things go wrong and the women have to improvise quickly to avoid detection didn’t generate much suspense or amusement in this quarter. But that’s all just Macguffin anyway: what we’re all supposed to enjoy is the exhilaration the women’s feel over their new bounty, their disagreement about how long to continue their shenanigans, and how they eventually get caught (we know they do almost immediately, since one of the script’s miscalculations is to start with scenes of their being arrested and periodically inserting bits of their interrogation by police).

Unfortunately, the picture lacks the sense of conspiratorial euphoria you’re supposed to feel with the women, despite the fact that their loot is destined for destruction anyway, because, quite frankly, it’s impossible to sympathize with them. Even if one feels for Nina’s desire to help her kids, for example, her romancing of a guard (Roger R. Cross) who discovers what they’re doing comes across as borderline cruel. Jackie and Bob aren’t much more than sitcom caricatures, and their sudden wealth is totally unearned. But the worst offender is certainly Keaton’s Bridget. Are we really supposed to feel sorry for a couple who prefer crime to moving to a smaller house, or even asking their grown-up children (whom we hear about but never see) for help? There’s a sense of sheer entitlement to her attitude that’s positively unpleasant, however enthusiastically Keaton tries to invest her with something of Lucille Ball’s old wild-eyed goofiness.

To be fair, Keaton is more tolerable here than she was in “Because I Said So,” even if her character is no great shakes. Certainly she’s preferable to Queen Latifah, who’s treated in too saintly a fashion, and Holmes, who’s hobbled by the fact that Jackie’s the most underwritten of the trio. (Her only trait is dancing to her ever-present iTunes.) Danson gets by on low-key charm, and Rothenberg has the slacker-dude bit down pat. But Root is encouraged to overplay the martinet boss, and McDonald never seems comfortable as the guard who falls in with the plot. The technical aspects of the picture—the first release from Overture Films, a new distribution outfit—are okay without being outstanding (John Bailey’s cinematography is rather flat). But the score, by Marty Davich and James Newton Howard, overpoints in the way familiar from so many comedies in which the composer feels the need to punch up anemic material.

As for Khouri, there’s a certain flabbiness to her work, which lacks the energy and precision Ridley Scott brought to “Thelma.” Not all writers are cut out for directing, and on the evidence here she might not be one of them. In her hands this “Money” doesn’t manage to be either sufficiently madcap or genuinely sharp. But not to worry: like the cash the women steal, it won’t be in circulation very long.