The remake kid is Ben Stiller -- a mildly pleasant presence, whose comic and romantic appeal has eluded me up to (and including) now. Hard as I try, I just don't get him, in general. I get more heartburn than heartbreak from his title role here, in particular.

This update of the 1972 Neil Simon and Elaine May "Heartbreak Kid" hit casts Stiller as fortysomething Eddie, a sad-faced guy on the rebound, much abused by his oversexed octogenarian father (Jerry Stiller) for not taking sexual advantage of his bachelorhood. Enter the incredibly hot Lila (Malin Akerman), whom Eddie tries to rescue from a purse-snatcher. He manages only to rescue her panties (which are adorned with a David Bowie logo), but -- afraid she might be his last chance -- Eddie quickly proposes and Lila quickly accepts.

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'The Heartbreak Kid'

• Starring: Ben Stiller, Malin Akerman, Michelle Monaghan, Jerry Stiller.
• Director: Peter and Bobby Farrelly
• Rating: R for strong sexual content, crude humor, language, nudity and drug use.
• Web site: HeartbreakKidMovie.com

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The pitfalls of hasty hitching are revealed on their Mexican honeymoon. Lila's idiosyncrasies include loudly warbling the lyrics to every song (from rock to rap). Her kinky, acrobatic sexual preferences would challenge the Flying Wallendas. Her deviated septum (with its Old Faithful-type nose gushings) is a result of cocaine use. And so on.

The bride, in short, is of Frankenstein. But soon enough, she is confined to their hotel room with the mother of all sunburns. It's a fourth-degree case, leaving her face more cratered than the moon and leaving Eddie free to meet and woo luminous Miranda (Michelle Monaghan) -- the REAL woman of his dreams -- at the same hotel.

Monaghan's cute Miranda act is better than Stiller's (one thinks longingly of Charles Grodin's original). Jerry Stiller's fabulously fake orange dye job covers up his gray hair but not his raunchy blue lines. Carlos Mencia as a sleazy hotel employee has never been unfunnier.

It's a bad sign when five people are credited with a screenplay -- co-directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly ("Dumb and Dumber," "There's Something About Mary"), plus Scot Armstrong, Leslie Dixon and Kevin Barnett. They try to bend things to their hipper, crasser comedy, but, judging by funereally silent stretches at the preview screening, they mostly confirm the conventional wisdom that good movies shouldn't be remade.

Gone are the Simon-May Jewish sensibilities and subtext of ethnic-class differences, replaced by R-rated vulgarities (which do include a few grotesquely funny sex scenes and a black-comic illegal immigrant sequence).

Overall, though, this "Kid" lacks all of the original's subtlety and sophistication, relying on increasingly slapstick sight-gag silliness as it lurches to a predictable end. Alas, there is no punch the Farrellys know how to pull.