Released yesterday on DVD: "Old Dogs"

Grade: F

I guess it’s appropriate as Easter approaches that we have Old Dogs, the season's blue-ribbon ham. A family comedy about two aging buddies forced to play daddy, it looks exactly like what you’d get if Robin Williams and John Travolta went out, got hammered, scrawled scenes on a bar napkin in random order, gave the napkin to Wild Hogs director Walt Becker, and filmed it. Trust me, you could do this all by yourself and save yourself the DVD rental fee.

The stars play Dan (Williams) and Charlie (Travolta), childhood pals now running a successful sports marketing company. (Travolta’s hairpiece plays itself.) They’re cut from the odd-couple mold: Dan’s a repressed fussbudget, Charlie’s the good-time, uh, Charlie. The nonsensical plot begins when Dan’s ex-wife (Kelly Preston, a.k.a. Mrs. Travolta) from a one-day Vegas marriage turns up with 7-year-old twins he didn’t know were his (Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta), announces she’s going to jail — for two weeks! for eco-terrorism! — and leaves the kids with the boys.

Old Dogs then veers from one flatly filmed, crassly comic sequence to the next with so little regard for connective logic that it’s practically avant-garde. The kids want to go camping? Cue the stars in Boy Scout uniforms harassed by Matt Dillon and Justin Long as psycho troop leaders. Dan’s not able to relax around his children? Charlie shows him how it’s done via a remote-controlled puppet suit. Who wrote this thing — Wile E. Coyote?

If Old Dogs isn’t the absolute worst movie either star has appeared in, it’s close enough to count. No crotch goes unpummeled here, no supporting actor misused. The lovely Lori Loughlin is bizarrely cast as a translator who asks Charlie on a date to her bereavement group, which is led by Ann-Margret nattering on about a rhubarb pie. Rita Wilson turns up as a cross-eyed hand model. The stars end up stuck in a gorilla enclosure with a shrieking Seth Green and a guy in an ape suit. It’s the drugs, I tell you.

At least Travolta got to spend a working vacation with his wife and daughter; that still doesn’t mean we have to pay for it. Old Dogs has the feel of a project that was made in a spirit of collegial fun and finished in a rush of desperation, with digital effects Ella Bleu must have done on her Polly Pocket computer.

You get the sense of how long the movie has been sitting on the shelf when Bernie Mac, who died 15 months for before its release, shows up as a magician. The studio, Disney, may have delayed the release of Old Dogs out of respect for the deceased comedian, or out of respect for Travolta after the death of his son last year. That’s very sensitive. If they had any respect for viewers, they might never have released it at all.

Released yesterday on DVD: "Planet 51"

Grade: C

The agreeable but flagrantly unoriginal Planet 51 belongs to the mix-and-match school of animated moviemaking that operates on the plaintive hope that familiarity is the surest path to the box office. Almost every element of the film, created by Ilion Animation Studios, based in Madrid, is borrowed from earlier films, then tweaked (and invariably softened) to become a reference rather than a copy.

Directed by Jorge Blanco, from a story by Joe Stillman, it portrays the inhabitants of Planet 51 in a faraway galaxy as smaller, green, Shrek-like creatures with antennas, webbed feet and squished noses. They go into a tizzy when a flag-toting American astronaut, Charles, or Chuck, Baker (voiced by Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock), sets down on their territory. At his side is an intrepid, seemingly indestructible, rock-collecting little robot (R2-D2 meets Wall-E) of doglike loyalty named Rover, minus the personality quirks of its forerunners.

When Chuck arrives, Lem (Justin Long), a 16-year-old sci-fi dweeb and a budding astronomer who works at a mountain observatory, becomes his protector and (in shades of E.T.), hides the astronaut in his suburban bedroom. Lem has a crush on his independent-minded neighbor Neera (Jessica Biel), a teenage Miss Piggy with plump lips who is there strictly to give the movie a dollop of tepid romance.

Other references include a lamppost dance to the tune of Singin’ in the Rain, a blast of Also Sprach Zarathustra (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a comic routine by Chuck that quotes from half a dozen sci-fi classics.

A central joke of the movie is that Planet 51 is a comic-book version of 1950s America, with its popular songs (Long Tall Sally and Lollipop are heard), its taste in science fiction and its flying-saucer paranoia.

It is of no comfort to the planet’s fearful populace that Chuck is a vain, dim-witted, aw-shucks ladies’ man, who happens to speak the same language (English), despite coming from 20 billion miles away. (The movie doesn’t bother to make anything of the coincidence.) Chuck barely knows how to operate a spacecraft, having coasted the distance on autopilot.

When the inhabitants are told that he is an evil alien, wielding mind control that will turn them into zombies, they believe it. Leading the charge against Chuck and Rover are General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and his ally Professor Kipple (John Cleese), a mad scientist spouting outlandish nonsense who is intent on extracting the astronaut’s brain for research.

Early on, the movie turns into a protracted game of hide-and-seek in which the big bad army (portrayed as a bunch of gun-crazy incompetents mugging ferocity) pursues and captures Chuck and keeps him in a subterranean military base. It remains for Lem and his pal Skiff (Seann William Scott), among a handful who recognize that Chuck is friendly, to help him escape and return to Earth, and for Chuck to become serious about taking command.

Although Planet 51 aspires to the same tone as the Shrek movies (Stillman was one of several screenwriters on the first two Shrek films), the dialogue lacks the facetious bite of its antecedents, in which the wisecracks never stop while gently pushing the envelop. The timidity of Planet 51, which doesn’t even make the pretense of subversion, owes partly to its being pitched to a younger audience and partly to its creators’ paucity of wit. Many opportunities for sharper satire are squandered, and what mild humor there is peters out in a final burst of triumphal ickiness.