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Old Dogs, the new Disney comedy starring John Travolta and Robin Williams as two lifelong friends thrust into parenthood when an old flame of Williams' turns up to leave his previously-unknown 7-year-olds with him so she can serve a week of jail time, is only 88 minutes long. I say this not just as a demonstration of the theory of relativity — because when it's playing, Old Dogs feels like an eternity, as if expanded by the same one-to-seven ratio we use to turn dog years into human years — but also to note that that slack, sagging 88 minutes still feels rushed, with what must have been scenes trimmed down to micro-blip montages, and a final scene playing out over the credits; it feels like even the people making Old Dogs wanted to be done with it.

Directed by Walter Becker (of the similarly scattershot but, in comparison, a work of genius Wild Hogs), Old Dogs will be seen by many as the worst film of the year; it isn't (paging All About Steve), but it's easy to see why Old Dogs earns such scorned, in only that it takes talented people and wastes them — not simply Travolta and Williams, but Seth Green, Bernie Mac, Luis Guzman, Amy Sedaris, Justin Long, Matt Dillon, Ann-Margaret, Rita Wilson, Kelly Preston, Dax Shepard … you could throw a dart at this cast of actors and hit a talented person; better yet, if you threw a dart at this cast, it would at least give them something to react to, which the script for Old Dogs — credited to David Diamond and David Weissman — does not. Instead, it has its cast limp from gag to gag, including such normally-reliable comedy bits as wild animals, pharmaceutical mishaps, misdirected aggression on the sporting field and teleconferencing confusion; each of these is executed so lazily, so blandly and so blankly you wonder if, by chance, a mistake was made and we are not watching the film so much as the videotape made of the read-through.

But then there's a bit where Travolta, having mixed up his meds, suffers facial paralysis — a joke made by having CGI twist his face into a Joker-like snarl of a smile; it may be the biggest ratio of dollars spent to laughs gotten in a long while, as it is both needlessly expensive and completely unfunny. But we're off, moving fast — not with the grace and speed of a sprinter, but, rather, the lightning-swift leaden bulk of a morbidly obese person thrown down a flight of stairs, flabby and yet fast, heading for an inevitable ugly end.

The kids are charming enough, played by Ella Bleu Travolta and Conner Rayburn, and so likeable that you wish there were in fact more of them — but Old Dogs is in such a rush to make its scenes funny that it forgets to make them scenes. Take the moment where the uptight, reserved Williams, doesn't know how to play with his daughter — so instead of a human scene about seeing an uncomfortable adult rediscover play, we get a frantic, forced bit about Travolta finding a "Body Puppeteer" (the late Bernie Mac) who fits Williams in a suit that makes him perform all of Travolta's movements by remote control. The idea behind the scene is washed away in the avalanche of needless nonsense Becker, Diamond and Weissman push into it in the rushed, strained attempt to get to the next scene. Which also has too much motion and not enough emotion, too much funny business and not enough actual work.

Old Dogs takes what could have been a good idea — older men adapting to parenthood — and covers it and smothers it in so much nonsense it's like seeing a spoonful of quality breakfast food drowned in thick, glistening slick sick gallons of high-fructose imitation artificial maple syrup in the mistaken hope of creating a sugar rush that lasts so long you're fooled into thinking it's a feast. You may be able to teach an old dog new tricks; someone, you would hope, will one day teach the people behind Old Dogs how to make an actual comedy in the first place so that they don't waste their cast of stars. Old Dogs wants you to think it's smiling, but that strained, skewed look on its face is actually the result of everyone involved rushing, racing and raging with gritted teeth to get it over with.

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