The 21st-century incarnation transforms the husband-and-wife team of motion study scientists (they were real-life pioneers in the field in the 1920s) into the flavorless Bakers, a college football coach (Steve Martin) and a former journalist turned full-time mom (Bonnie Hunt).

They're less parents than zookeepers riding herd on a hyperactive, mostly anonymous collection of kids, who appear to be assembled from other films, tossed together and told to act up and act out.

What they don't act like is a family, though the familiar components are all here: the grown daughter (Piper Perabo) who fled the chaos for a quiet life in the city with her boyfriend (an uncredited Ashton Kutcher as a vain, talentless actor), the brooding boy on the verge of 18 (Tom Welling of "Smallville"), his fashion-obsessed younger sister (tween queen Hilary Duff). There's even a proverbial red-headed stepchild so out of step with the family that his siblings have nicknamed him Fed-Ex (as in "delivered by"). The rest of the kids get a line or two, but are so generic that you'd be hard-pressed to pick any of them out of a lineup.

The best thing the film has going for it is the frisky chemistry between Martin and Hunt, who genuinely seem to enjoy being in the eye of this adolescent hurricane. So it's no surprise that the already frayed film falls apart when Mom heads off on a book tour right after they move the grumbling kids, kicking and screaming, to Chicago. Martin suddenly becomes a humorless patriarch who treats all the pranks and daily disasters that were once tolerated, even encouraged, as mutiny.

As the pre-fab problems and half-hearted conflicts are solved with a group hug and an easy aphorism, the banal and colorless "Cheaper by the Dozen" resembles nothing more than an overstuffed, undernourished "Brady Bunch" episode, only not as funny.