Chris Rock imports plot, laughs from Brit flick ‘Funeral’

Chris Rock has had trouble translating his stand-up genius into mainstream movie success, so he's taken matters into his own hands.

He's started to direct and produce more of his own material, and when he spotted the below-radar British farce "Death at a Funeral" a few years ago, he snapped it up.

Rock had the intriguing idea of remaking "Death" - a slapstick comedy about starched Brits grappling with calamitous events at a funeral - with an African-American cast, a cultural shift that we'd expect to give the movie an entirely different comic imprint.

He also hired notoriously edgy Neil LaBute ("Lakeview Terrace") to direct the remake, adding the promise of something enjoyably unstable, maybe even volcanic.

The new "Death," though, is surprisingly well-behaved - it rarely colors outside the lines drawn by the original, and it's about as staid a movie as you could expect from a plot that features a dwarf extortionist.

Rock has the central role as Aaron, hosting a funeral for his father, trying to maintain order on a day when everything is going wrong - the wrong corpse arrives, his child-crazed wife is ovulating and pressuring him for sex, his mother is taunting his childless wife, his tightwad brother (Martin Lawrence) is refusing to chip in for the funeral.

A niece (Zoe Saldana) brings a white boyfriend (James Marsden) who drops acid and freaks out, a cranky uncle (Danny Glover) insults everybody, and then there's the dwarf - Peter Dinklage, reprising his role from the original, blackmailing Aaron with photos about his father's secret life.

If you've seen the British version, you'll be disappointed at how little fuel this version adds to the fire of the original. If you haven't, you'll be more likely to enjoy the parade of funny actors - Tracy Morgan as a socially blundering guest, Kevin Hart as an incompetent mortician. Luke Wilson contributes little as a romantic rival for Saldana.

I'm not sure what attracted LaBute to this job - his track record suggests that he'd find something sardonic in the script, but he contributes journeymen work here.

It's not clear that he even understands visual jokes - the big, classic gag in "Death" centers around what happens at the precise moment when Aaron eulogizes his father as "an exceptional man," a moment that finds LaBute with his camera in the wrong place.

The movie's big, talented cast, on the other hand, knows where the laughs are, and carries the movie as far as it can go.