Featuring the voices of Owen Wilson and Kiefer Sutherland. Rated G. Opens Friday, June 4.

As a comic strip, Marmaduke is based on the simple premise of an overactive Great Dane creating havoc around the house. How do you turn this into a 90-minute movie? Well, it helps to give your title mutt the voice of Owen Wilson—who dials up the charm to create an obligingly slobbering slacker. Sadly, the rest is a dog’s breakfast of pet-comedy clichés. Director Tom Dey (Shanghai Noon) and his screenwriters feed us table scraps from the likes of Marley & Me and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

That’s too bad, because somewhere in this uninspired mix of live action and CGI, the basic goofiness of the source material is longing to get out. In fact, what works best in this locally shot feature are the isolated moments of four-legged slapstick. In short, we need way more of Marmaduke knocking over stuff that looks really expensive. But the plot gets convoluted early, alternating between predictable problems with Marmaduke’s human family and romantic complications in his canine world.

Marmaduke’s harried owner (a disengaged Lee Pace) lands his dream job, but he has a tough time placating wife and family after uprooting them to California. They’re not the only ones feeling a sense of dislocation: Marmaduke must contend with a new pack of neighbourhood dogs that includes a bully named Bosco (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) and his flirtatious collie girlfriend (voiced by Fergie).

As middlebrow “family entertainment”, most of this is familiar. But do we really need a pretentious message about purebred dogs getting along with mongrels? Spare me the moral on off-leash integration and just have the big dog knock over a vase.