In case anyone in the audience isn't sure when to cackle, coo, snicker or sigh, the makers of "Old Dogs" have provided a handy on-screen prompt.

It's an old dog, shown in closeup, reacting with little grunts of canine confusion or curiosity over the antics of Robin Williams and John Travolta in this dead stray of a family comedy.

Director Walt Becker cuts away to the pooch, the aging pet of Travolta's character, again and again. So often, in fact, that maybe Sebastian, the 9-year-old dog playing the creaky old pet, should have shared top billing with Travolta and Williams in this rubbish about middle-aged buddies caring for young twins one of them never knew he fathered.

At some point, you half expect to hear the dog's thoughts, like the yammering pets in "Look Who's Talking Now," the last in Travolta's talking-baby series (a movie franchise that seems like Preston Sturges compared to this).

Whatever the old dog might want to say, it's bound to have been more interesting than anything uttered by the two-legged creatures in "Old Dogs."

Becker, who scored a hit working with Travolta on 2007's dumb but inoffensive "Wild Hogs," takes things down a notch or two for "Old Dogs."

Travolta plays swinging bachelor Charlie to Williams' mopey Dan, pals since childhood who run a successful sports-marketing agency.

The movie opens with a flurry of ham-fisted flashbacks as Charlie inexplicably starts a crucial business meeting by chronicling Dan's whirlwind marriage to Vicki (Kelly Preston, Travolta's real-life wife) seven years earlier.

Dan and Vicki split immediately, but the brief marriage resulted in twins (Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta, Preston and Travolta's daughter). With Charlie and Dan caught up in negotiations for the biggest deal of their careers, Vicki arrives needing to stash the kids with their dad for two weeks while she's off doing jail time for a political protest.

Will the parentally inept Dan prove he can be a dad to his twins? Will the kids' shenanigans foul up Charlie and Dan's big deal? Will their friendship survive the strain, will business or family win out? Will Sebastian ever speak his mind?

We all know the answers before the movie starts. The fun is supposed to be in getting there, but "Old Dogs" is no fun whatsoever, just a collection of stale kibble.

Working from a screenplay by David Diamond and David Weissman, Becker offers bad gags about doggie incontinence, golfballs to the groin and repetitive jokes about people mistaking Travolta and Williams as grandparents.

The physical humor is crude and often cruel, a hand model's precious digits mashed by a car trunk, a Frisbee football game that gives way to mean-spirited elbows and crushing tackles.

A family affair for Travolta, the movie also serves up a couple of his siblings among a group of incredibly annoying singing waiters and waitresses (yeah, singing waiters are supposed to be annoying; doesn't make them funny, though).

Emitting falsetto shrieks much of the time, Seth Green makes a nuisance of himself as Dan and Charlie's protege, while Lori Loughlin just simpers along as a translator that wolfish Charlie hits on.

Matt Dillon, Ann-Margret and the late Bernie Mac turn up in succession as "Old Dogs" stumbles from one clumsy anecdotal sketch to the next.

Luis Guzman and Dax Shepard appear in terribly unfunny bits as feuding child-proofers, though luckily for them, both actors are unbilled, so they can avoid their share of the blame for this mess.

Travolta and Williams truly put some energy into their characters, but there's nothing there for them to play. "Old Dogs" is so empty-headed, all they can do is put on goofy, sometimes creepy, faces and try to make observations about their aging bodies sound amusing.

We understand that actors want to keep busy, they want to work with people they admire, they have to do commercial projects to buy the Hollywood goodwill to film those small, artsy things they REALLY want to make. And of course, they do want to make lots of money.

But come on, guys. Did the family dog eat all the other big studio scripts you had piled by your bedsides, leaving only this poo to thumb through?

If Sebastian could talk, even he might say, "I need a better agent."

When considering the meager merits of the bone-snapping, blood-splattered "Ninja Assassin," it's best to remember the words of John Goodman's PC-challenged character in "The Big Lebowski": "The man in the black pajamas, Dude. Worthy ... adversary."

The makers of "Ninja Assassin" want to make those words real and rescue the ninja from the province of turtles. They want you to revere the ninja. A frightened old man at the beginning of the movie can't even bring himself to utter the word "ninja." That's how much respect the old-timer has for "the man in the black pajamas."

"Ninja Assassin," though, has a funny way paying its respects to the sword-wielding saboteurs. Director James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta") and his producing partners, Larry and Andy Wachowski ("The Matrix"), are clearly more interested in spraying geysers of digital blood than in establishing the ninja as a foe to be taken seriously. There hasn't been this much limb-severing in a movie since the Black Knight's "flesh wound" in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

The death-dealers in "Ninja Assassin" belong to the Ozunu Clan, a secret society that, for the past thousand years, has supplied killers to any government that has a "hundred pounds of gold." Their artery-severing antics have come to the attention of beautiful Europol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris), which is bad news for her since they don't believe in advertising.

Fortunately for Mika, the clan's deadliest assassin, the brooding Raizo (Korean pop star Rain), has decided to betray his brothers after watching them butcher the love of his life. Raizo somehow finds Mika in Berlin and the two dodge flying blades and other pointy weapons on their way to a final confrontation with the clan's raspy-voiced father figure, Ozunu (Sho Kosugi, star of countless ninja movies from the 1980s).

To work, "Ninja Assassin" needn't have equated a seriousness of purpose with self-seriousness. But it's clear from its opening round of mayhem and decapitations that McTeigue simply wants to satiate fanboys' bloodlust in the most simple-minded fashion possible. That first scene is a doozy with fountains of arterial spray rivaling the nightly show at the Bellagio.

However, since the ninjas only come out when it's dark, most of the movie's fight scenes are low on both visibility and excitement. The murky dimness provides a nice contrast with the bright red blood spraying everywhere, but it doesn't help much in tallying the body count. The movie loses style points, too, for variety (the fights are almost exclusively shot in close-up) and for its fumbling, quick-cut editing.

As for Rain, the movie addresses the problem with an in-joke that's a little too on-the-nose to be funny. "He doesn't look like a killing machine to me," a rival says. "He looks like he belongs in a boy band." In other words, not exactly a worthy adversary.

It may not merit the adjective in its title, yet the animated yarn Fantastic Mr. Fox offers some of the most goofy fun you'll have at a theater this season.

With George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray leading the top-notch voice cast, director Wes Anderson has found an ideal story and medium — stop-motion animation — to bring his cockeyed vision to the cartoon world.

Brits may be annoyed at this latest Americanization of one of their beloved literary works. Yet in the hands of Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore), Roald Dahl's illustrated children's book gets loving treatment and a distinct handcrafted style that sets it apart from the sleek computer-generated imagery dominating animation today.

This story of a poultry-thieving fox and the evil farmers waging war on him is a delightful whirlwind of mayhem and high spirits. It's lightweight fun, yet Fantastic Mr. Fox, opening today, succeeds on all levels, presenting cute and clever little varmints to charm children while offering adults merry screwball humor that slyly stretches the film's family-friendly PG rating.

Clooney provides vocals for the title character, a fox who reluctantly gives up his glamorous but perilous chicken-snatching life at the behest of his wife (voice by Streep), who wants to raise a family in peace and quiet.

Years later, they have a nice new home that stretches the finances of Mr. Fox's job as a newspaper columnist for the local animal community. The Foxes have a sullen teen son (Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman) whose insecurities are compounded by a visit from his handsome, talented cousin (Anderson's brother, Eric, also an illustrator on the film).
His domicile in plain sight of the livestock and produce riches of farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, Mr. Fox is unable to resist one last poultry caper, but his raids on all three farms bring down the mechanized wrath of the human world on all surrounding wildlife.

Trapped underground with his family and a menagerie of angry neighbors, Mr. Fox marshals an inter-species rebellion against the humans that want to exterminate them.

The slightly clunky, coarse animation — little puppets on miniature sets, moved in tiny increments and photographed a frame at a time — beautifully complements this shaggy-dog story.

Clooney's in his best smooth-talker form and Streep's vocals are pure grace and class, supported by great drollery from Schwartzman and frequent Anderson collaborator Murray, providing the voice of a Badger who is Mr. Fox's attorney.

These animals basically are humans in fur costumes, walking upright and relating to one another in neighborly isolationism, each family and species caught up in their private concerns.

A perfect family, no. But definitely one you won't mind joining for an hour and a half.