Time marches on. Fresh-faced Tom Hanks is playing dour Depression-era hitmen and now it's his 24-year-old son - the puppyish and pleasant-featured Colin - who's taking the ingenuous comic roles that his dad once made his own. Hanks plays Shaun, a would-be writer from Orange County, California, yearning to go to Stanford University, in this intermittently lively but basically pretty ordinary comedy, directed by Jake Kasdan, himself the inheritor of a great name from father Lawrence.

There are promising situations. Shaun lives with his possessive mom who is trying to sabotage any plans he has to leave home. His divorced dad lives with a much younger trophy wife, who thinks it's OK for a toddler still to have a dummy. Most promisingly of all, there is Jack Black, playing Shaun's no-account brother Lance. Frustratingly, Black has still to live up to the form he showed in High Fidelity: nothing he's done since then has been as good and he's certainly disappointing here. He was actually funnier live and unscripted on the Jonathan Ross show last Friday.

There are some good lines, of course; I loved the aspirant Joss Whedon-type scriptwriter explaining how he's written a vampire TV show which is actually about the reunification of Germany. But this is mostly weak stuff, with a timid and reactionary final message about how it's better to stay in your home town, rather than go for a big-city college education.