F

The new “Yours, Mine and Ours”–a very loose remake of the 1968 comedy about two large broods brought together when their widowed parents wed–is preceded by the logos of no fewer than three Hollywood studios–Paramount (the actual distributor), MGM and Columbia–as well as that of the Nickelodeon Movies outfit affiliated to the family-friendly cable network. Apparently none of them wants to take the blame alone, and given the quality of the product, it’s easy to understand why.

The decision to resuscitate the property probably arose from the inexplicable success of “Cheaper by the Dozen,” itself a really dumbed-down version of a 1950 flick about a family with a load of kids. “Yours, Mine and Ours” probably seemed an equally safe bet, even though the similarity to “The Brady Bunch,” which had followed the first film by a year and went through not just a long-running network career but several telefilms and a couple of features that actually satirized the premise, might have given the makers some pause.

But they’ve blundered ahead anyway to give us a picture that’s at once so bland and so frantic that it’s almost unendurable. In the updating by Ron Burch and David Kidd (“Head Over Heels” and “Inspector Gadget”), the adults are dunderheads and the children uniformly annoying. Frank Beardsley (Dennis Quaid) is a widowed Coast Guard admiral with eight kids whom he raises with military discipline. At a high school reunion he connects with his erstwhile campus girlfriend Helen North (Rene Russo), a handbag designer as free-spirited as he is buttoned-down; and not only has she also lost her spouse, but has ten children. (In order to provide the requisite diversity, most of them are adopted.) The two hit it off immediately and marry apparently without even letting the youngsters know. And after they move en masse into a fixer-upper lighthouse–along with the Norths’ pet pig (an animal that gets more footage in reaction shots than dogs do in most movies–and is even more revolting) and the Beardsleys’ crotchety housekeeper Mrs. Munion (Linda Hunt)–things quickly deteriorate. The parents’ modes of child-rearing clash, with Frank favoring spit-and-polish obedience and Helen a laissez-faire attitude, and the two sets of kids, the one squeaky clean and the other decidedly lax, instantly dislike one another. (We go them one better by disliking them all.) The big plot-driver is the youngsters’ decision to work together to split Mom and Dad up so they can all return to their respective pre-marriage circumstances. This leads to much chaotic slapstick destruction, in which poor Frank suffers indignity after indignity as Helen mostly looks on with a mixture of concern and sadness while occasionally letting out a derisive horse-laugh. Of course, although the kids succeed they bond in the process, and eventually must try to mend what they’ve broken. Do you suppose they succeed?

There’s a slim chance somebody could have put some wit and style into this stuff, but Raja Gosnell (“Home Alone 3,” “Big Momma’s House” and the “Scooby Doo” movies) is hardly the man to do it. In his hands everything is played at a stentorian pitch, which encourages the cast to show no restraint. Quaid suffers most, since he’s the butt of most of the slapstick jokes, but Russo and Hunt are almost equally embarrassed, while Jerry O’Connell (as–I think–Helen’s agent and would-be suitor) and Rip Torn (as Frank’s superior) are given little to do but smile (though Torn appears so covered in makeup that perhaps it’s just that his face is frozen into a permanent grimace). Also on hand is the now apparently ubiquitous David Koechner as Frank’s goofy Coast Guard pal Darrell; may one issue an appeal that he not be cast in another film for at least a year or so? (Weren’t “Daltry Calhoun” and “Waiting” enough?) As for the youngsters, most are fairly anonymous, but Sean Faris is stalwartly dull and Katiya Pevec prissy as the eldest Beardsley children while Danielle Panabaker and Drake Bell are suitably snarky as the oldest members of the North clan. It would be difficult to say which of the littler ones are most annoying, but certainly Andrew Vo, as an adoptee who’s especially interested in fashion, comes near to taking the prize. And though on the technical side the picture has a professional sheen (Theo Van de Sande was the cinematographer), Christophe Beck’s score unfortunately fits the action perfectly–it’s equally loud and abrasive.

The advent of this stinker is all the more depressing in that it precedes “Cheaper by the Dozen 2” by only a couple of weeks. Will no one save us from this plague of alternately messy and mawkish comedies about oversized families? It almost makes one nostalgic for “The Pacifier.” At least there were only three kids in that.