How could you make Steve Martin's lame Cheaper By The Dozen series look like a work of comic invention, richly-observed farce and a guarantee of split sides?

Well, you make Yours, Mine & Ours, that's how.

Pinching the supersized family template and reworking the 1968 comedy starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, this is a comedy so low on laughs Jim Davidson wouldn't touch it.

Dennis Quaid has the thankless task of playing US Coast Guard admiral Frank Beardsley, a disciplinarian widower with eight children.

On the other side of the behavioural spectrum is hippie chick Rene Russo, whose husband has died leaving her with a brood of ten lively nippers.

(Her svelte figure is explained by the fact she adopted six, lending the script leeway to make them range from a jazz-talkin' homie (Lil' JJ) to a grafitti tagger (Dylan Bell)).

Before you can say "family allowance", the odd couple have tied the knot and the entire clan have moved into a run-down lighthouse on the New England coast.

However, the Beardsleys - disciplined, conservative, stuck-up - are soon at loggerheads with Russo's free-spirited crew of New Age hipsters.

The only way they can resolve this, the kids figure - is to drive a wedge between mum and dad and stage manage their new parents' quickie divorce.

Hoot as the pet family pig munches away on pizza, cackle as a spot of decorating turns into a DIY free-for-all and panic when you can't see the green cinema exit signs.

This really is very poor. Quaid and Russo - both excellent actors given the right role - mug furiously but appear slightly embarrassed to have signed up.

Slapstick setpiece follows slapstick setpiece while the dire dialogue serves up such profundities as "a lighthouse without a light is just a house."

It's enough to make you feel nostalgic for the reign of King Herod.

Tim Evans