Starring Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, and Martin Lawrence. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 16

When comedians this good can’t make a film funny, you know it’s dead in the water.

God knows Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, and crew try. And that’s part of the problem: you can feel them trying to milk the material, just like you can sense the plot straining to pile on more bad taste, black humour, and wacky slapstick in an attempt to eek out laughs.

Things start to die from the opening’s long and belaboured setup, when a coffin is delivered to Rock’s character’s tony Pasadena home, and he opens it to see a Chinese man, instead of his dad, lying there. (To his credit, he does get off one good line: “This ain’t Burger King; you just can’t mess up my order.”) Neil LaBute helms this remake of the so-so 2007 Brit farce by Frank Oz. But there’s nothing of LaBute’s subtle, dry-as-the-Mojave, Friends & Neighbours social satire here. Instead, all the mayhem that breaks out at a family patriarch’s funeral involves big, outrageous situations—a mislabelled bottle of acid, a gay dwarf, a naked man on a roof, and, when all else fails, flying poop.

Mostly, the talented cast is wasted. Rock has to rein himself in as the family worrywart, Morgan is a hypochondriac babysitting a crotchety older uncle (Danny Glover), and Zoí« Saldana spends the movie fretting about her tripping-out white boyfriend, Oscar (James Marsden). To his credit, the accidentally high, permagrinning Oscar snags some of the only big laughs in the movie, blissing out to the green of the leaves and hallucinating the coffin is moving. Props go to Morgan, too, for putting his own warped Morganish spin on even the most dubious lines (“Everything is copacetic. I’m going to forget about the poop in my mouth”).

Oz’s film arguably worked a bit better, because it could at least play the offensive stuff off the solemnity of the funeral and the family’s stiff upper lips. Needless to say, Morgan and Rock, let alone their costar Martin Lawrence, don’t exactly give off that uptight vibe.