Yours, Mine and Ours updates the 1968 original starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. Based loosely on a book, it also arrived as something of an update to Cheaper by the Dozen, which itself has been updated twice since. The point being, in a world of depleted originality, the current Yours, Mine and Ours is a masterwork of uncreativity.

Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid take the reigns as former lovers who have a second chance at marriage and will bring with them enough children for a football team. Naturally, the parenting styles differ; Frank is a career naval officer, Helen is a designer who firmly believes that ‘homes are for free expression, not good impressions’. Translated, her kids are brats while his could teach the Von Trapp’s a thing or two about posture. Cue dysfunctional mayhem as the two halves fail to make a whole, and the kids hatch a plan to save themselves by splitting their parents. How children have changed in forty years.

There’s a spark of interest generated between Russo and Quaid. In fact, had they left the kids at home and cultivated the romantic comedy potential, this might have been half-good. Instead we get a shrill episode of The Brady Bunch meets Family Feud and it’s all bad. A measure of just how excruciating things become is illustrated in the film’s funniest moment – Frank cleans his teeth. It’s what you should expect when the director of Scooby Doo: 2 and  Home Alone: 3 gets to work a screenplay by the writer of Head Over Heels. Even ten year olds will struggle with this dull-witted, formulaic exercise.

// COLIN FRASER