The first time around, The Shaggy Dog was simple. Disney star Tommy Kirk ran afoul of a cursed "Borgia" ring, which transformed him into the neighbor's friendly sheepdog. To keep the younger kiddies amused, he had the conflict of his dad not liking dogs, all the while trying to save that European neighbor Francesca from kidnappers. If the movie had a touch of Cold War paranoia, it's because everything did - it wasn't searching for meaning, just entertainment.

Tim Allen's new remake wants to be entertaining, too, and is for the most part successful. By shifting the focus to an adult, Allen playing attorney Dave Douglas (an idea lifted from the sequel The Shaggy D.A.), the movie also gets bogged down in teaching a life lesson about paying attention to your children - because children know best, of course.

While this might trigger some cranky old man response, the story gets even more complicated. One of the things the children are right about is animal testing, though really, the script by Cormac and Marianne Wibley can't even make that simple.

The testing turns out to be on a 300-year-old sheepdog called "The Dog of the Ages" by its Tibetan masters/disciples, a mutant capable of transforming a human into a dog with tiny mutagenic nanopups in its saliva. The dog is also sporadically wise and possibly telepathic, choosing Dave Douglas as its victim for the dual purpose of life lessons and exposing the lab.

Conveniently, Douglas is an assistant District Attorney prosecuting a high school teacher for burning down a lab belonging to the very company experimenting on the Doggy Lama.

Though the animal experimentation wouldn't really have anything to do with the teacher's guilt or not, it seems to be all that anyone can talk about. Somebody should explain to Douglas and his boss Ken Hollister (Danny Glover) that motive might actually make their prosecution a slam dunk. Of course, it is L.A…

What the experiments do is provide an excuse for Robert Downey, Jr. to slum in what would have once been the role assigned to Cesar Romero or Dick Van Patten. He blows those esteemed predecessors away, gnawing on his scenes like they were a Milk Bone. For Downey plays evil, yet with just the right cartoonishness that younger kids won't quite get it.

They will get every other plot point, though, because this movie isn't so much about its ideas as it is showcasing how funny Tim Allen is. Though an earlier Disney film, 101 Dalmatians, trusted that its dogs would be communicative enough, director Brian Robbins makes sure that we hear every thought that Allen has in sheepdog form. While the conceit allows for occasionally clever one-liners, it also gets wearing as he offers a running stream of exposition right on the wet nose.

If ever there was a sign of how movies have shifted to keeping an eye on the home video market, this would be it. Television keeps a constant chatter so we'll stay awake for commercials, and as viewers we've grown used to that. Film, however, used to be content to let its images tell a story. Having cut his directing teeth on Nickelodeon's All That, Robbins knows how to keep that chatter going.

To his credit, he also knows how to stage a gag, even if he repeats them a few too many times. The visual humor stays pretty broad here, aimed at the young, but it's still better done than Shawn Levy's hamfisted work on The Pink Panther.

A bit of money was spent on CG, too, but Robbins keeps that to a minimum. Most of the transformations of Allen into a dog remain off-camera; for the sake of argument, we'll call that an artistic choice, leaving something to the audience's imagination. After all, we do get a strange bullfrog/bulldog hybrid that looks too, too real.

In fact, it's a little more real than the Douglas family, cookie-cutter wife (Kristen Davis) and kids with predictable conflicts that come to a head in the two day period that Dad becomes a dog.

Oddly, this film marks the first of three films this year (Zoom and The Santa Clause 3 being the other two) in which adequate child actor Spencer Breslin co-stars with Tim Allen. One of them must have some sort of incriminating evidence on the other. Even Jackie Coogan only worked with Chaplin once.

Dumbed down but not to the point of insulting, The Shaggy Dog will be loved by kids, though I'd still take a shot on showing them the original. The audience I sat with howled through it, and that wasn't a pun.

Rating:

Derek McCaw