THE recent success of King Kong has shown that you can make a film three times and have it evolve.

But Susan Stroman's big screen version of The Producers is a remake of the stage play, which was a remake of the 1960s film by Mel Brooks, and adds very little to what went before.

The original may have introduced the term "creative accounting" to the world, but the sequel is pretty parsimonious with its imagination elsewhere.

Almost all of the cast of the Tony-award-winning Broadway version, which Stroman also helmed, are back for the film but the grandstanding performances and weak songs are exposed on the big screen.

When it was first released the wilful offensiveness of Brooks' comedy was shocking.

A washed-up stage producer and his mousy accountant hit upon the idea of raising huge amounts of money for a project certain to fail and then pocketing the surplus.

The play in question is the Nazi-championing Springtime For Hitler.

With an insanely over-the-top director on board and a loopy Swedish bombshell in the lead, the pair feel they have a guaranteed flop on their hands.

But, as the success of singer James Blunt has recently demonstrated, there is no accounting for taste.

Nathan Lane (as producer Max Bialystock) and Matthew Broderick (accountant Leo Bloom) have little of the striking quirks of the original film's pairing of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.

Lane has never been the most subtle of actors but here he seems convinced he is still on stage and seems to be directing his performance to someone hard of hearing at the back of the upper circle.

Broderick is a decent foil to such expansiveness but the broad humour seems to jarr with his more reserved style.

Still, he does give his all as a decent hoofer in the big song and dance scenes.

The film is stolen, as so many are, by the gangly talents of Will Ferrell.

Playing Teutonic buffoon Franz Liebkind, the escaped Nazi who has penned Springtime For Hitler, he is a manic delight.

He brings the only real sense of danger and surprise in the film.

Uma Thurman is impressively tall and limber as starlet Ulla.

She has a 15-syllable surname but unfortunately her singing is just as poorly pronounced.

What the stage musical and this film version have not grasped is that the songs in the show are - deliberately Brooks would say - awful.

Making a feature of them is a joke that often backfires.

Apart from the song Springtime For Hitler, the rest of the songs are turgid and forgettable.

The subject material has lost much of its shock value by now.

The film is kept in the 1950s to add piquancy to the offences on stage but it will never have the effect of the original.

So what is really the point of this film?

It is hard to not believe that it was not greenlighted because of the international success of the stage version and the desire for yet bigger takings.

It is ironic that now it is The Producers itself which offends more than the idiocy of the play within it.