Starring Tim Allen and Robert Downey Jr. Rated general.

It's one thing to have Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis actually take on each other's mannerisms in Freaky Friday, since that takes real-whaddyacallit? oh, yeah-talent. But when Tim Allen, here playing a caninephobic district attorney, trades bodies with a spectacularly smart Tibetan sheepdog (actually a bearded collie), not only does the dog get the lousy end of the deal, the process consists mostly of talking softly (in numbing voice-over) and carrying a big shtick.

The original Disney flick, from 1959 (and one of the company's first ventures into live-action filmmaking), centred on Fred MacMurray as a dog-hating postal worker, although it was Tommy Kirk, as his moody son, who did the hairy transformation. (That might have had something to do with the presence of Annette Funicello.)

This version, penned by a kennelful of writers, is most fun around the edges, as when the cranky DA is bit by the so-named Shaggy and has a CSI moment, with zillions of tiny green dogs seen shooting into his bloodstream. The other main source of delight is Robert Downey Jr. who, as the evil head of a giant drug company (talk about compounded badness!), is pretty twitchy himself.

In fact, it's too bad Downey didn't play the dad; the idea of him as harried family man and competent attorney is funny on the face of it, and some sparks might have flown with the wifey-wife played by Sex and the City's Kristin Davis. Instead, Allen settles for his usual miffed suburban mugging; little is made of his suddenly oversize tongue, and there's nary a leg hump to be seen. Where is John Waters when you need him?

And the fact that the film's main plot point is built on the U.S. government invading Chinese territory to kidnap a dog on behalf of a pharmaceutical company under violent attack by animal-rights activists? Well, all these years after Fred MacMurray, does Disney really know what it's getting itself into?