Starring Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo. Rated general. For showtimes, please see page 101

Hey, ever heard of the book Who Gets the Drumstick?: The Story of the Beardsley Family? You haven't? Well, hurry, because there's a single 1965 hardcover with yellowed pages and tears in the dust jacket for sale on Amazon.com for US$200. Yours, Mine & Ours-which has foggy origins in Drumstick's true story of a chaotic marriage between a widow with 10 kids and a widower with eight kids-is so shamelessly devoid of personality, punch, or point, that the 40-year-old book with the corny title has just got to be a better deal than a matinee of this lame stepchild.

Of course, Yours, Mine &a Ours is more notably based on the 1968 movie with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, but that film was blessed with actual family-comedy charm and wacky Ball sight gags involving false eyelashes and martinis. The current incarnation operates under the near-moronic belief that a large pig running loose in the family home, snatching pizza slices and French-kissing sleeping humans, is hilarious. Most four-year-olds would rather play with a stick and a mud puddle than watch endless unfunny set pieces of 18 cardboard-cutout kids engaged in paint fights, bathroom fights, breakfast-table fights, and dull teen keggers, plus deadly cute twins joyriding a runaway forklift through a hardware superstore.

Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo play widower Frank Beardsley, an anal-retentive admiral of the Coast Guard whose children salute him, and widow Helen North, a free-spirit handbag designer who lives in a pink house with the pig and P.C.-cute non-Caucasian adoptees added to her faux-bohemian brood. Quaid and Russo have only themselves (and maybe their agents) to blame for tying themselves to the grill of this family bus wreck. In the nonstory leading to nonconflict, the former high-school sweethearts meet again and impulsively marry, after which their 18 assorted indistinct, bland children band together to break them up with a series of gags that would be embarrassing in a low-budget sitcom.

Quaid submits to frequent dumb indignities involving either falling into gross substances or having wet, sticky things dumped on him, and he and Russo don't have the comedy-pro chops to step clear of the mess. Rip Torn, Linda Hunt, and Jerry O'Connell also masochistically appear in roles that feel suspiciously snipped, for which they may be grateful. Director Raja Gosnell, to blame for both Scooby-Doos and Home Alone 3, is wholly unable to bring any edge, or even genuine warmth and amusement, to the saccharine-safe material. Thankfully, these Beardsleys didn't add a 19th kid to their demon-dull spawn as Ball and Fonda's characters did, but on the other hand we probably wouldn't even notice. Grab that Drumstick!