As critics, we often like to rant and rave about “the lowest common denominator” and how they elevate schlock like The Pink Panther remakeand turn it into box office gold. They make studio executives think that the filmmakers behind these films are geniuses and are thus granted bigger budgets and bigger stars for their next movie. It happens all the time, perhaps more often than we like to think about, but around every corner there’s always some lead that a Hollywood director can spin into box office gold. I just figured the same would hold true for Old Dogs, the new film from director Walt Becker. But then something weird happened in the public screening I attended: no one laughed.

It wasn’t a complete wall of silence because there were some chuckles, but for the most part you could hear a pin drop. Or you would have if it weren’t for the deafening volume at which the filmmakers played their tired, old soundtrack selections. Old Dogs is perfectly named. It’s tired, it’s bored and it’s made from the recycled parts of other similar family comedies. What’s worse is that this movie already came out this year. Eddie Murphy starred in Imagine That, which came and went with barely a whisper caught somewhere between giant robots and boy wizards. Imagine That was about a father that’d rather be making business deals and taking commissions rather than making his kid’s lunch and taking her to school. Old Dogs just multiples things by two.

In this film, Robin Williams is the hapless father of twins, but he has back-up in the form of John Travolta. Williams and Travolta play Dan and Charlie, executives in some kind of sports marketing firm, that point’s not made explicitly clear. And because this is the simplest kind of screenwriting possible, Dan and Charlie are exact opposites with Dan being an uptight fuddy-duddy and Charlie being a laidback womanizer. Strangely though, it’s Dan that has the kids that appear form nowhere when his old flame Vicki reappears quite suddenly. Their fling seven years earlier resulted in young Zach and Emily (Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta), and now that Vicki’s going to prison for two weeks for a trespassing charge, she needs an emergency babysitter, and the children’s father will do in a pinch.

Putting aside for a moment the insane clown logic that gets this party started, it would matter less if the so-called comedy that followed delivered something original. In scene after scene, Old Dogs strains to make us laugh with stale leftovers of comedic bits. The kids want to go camping, which Dan and Charlie are too urbane to handle. The kids accidentally mix up Dan and Charlie’s various medications, which all have ludicrously over-the-top adverse reactions the first time you take them. Naturally, the kids start growing on Dan, which eventually leads to the age old showdown of work versus family. Guess which one he ends up deciding to go with after a do-over, and which one works itself out regardless?

Occasionally, Old Dogs does surprise with something funny, like the fact that Dan and Charlie ware always being mistaken for grandparents or the scene where Dan tries to sneak the kids into his for adults only apartment complex. These gags though never seem to go far enough, you chuckle for a moment, the moment passes and we’re on to the next thing. Usually it’s a scene where Robin Williams humiliates himself with a spray-on tan gone awry or short-circuiting the remote-controlled human puppet suit he’s wearing so that third parties can help him better relate to his kids. If that doesn’t strike you as funny, then Seth Green gets whacked in the nuts with a golf ball twice. That one actually got the crowd laughing because man-getting-hit-in-the-groin-with-a-ball is the film comedy equivalent of playing a game of stick with your dog, it’s easy to do and you both have a good time doing it. But perhaps this is my way of saying that Old Dogs was aptly named, it’s all bark, no bite and it seems to take forever getting anywhere.