'Mr Popper's Penguins' a creative debacle

I could probably come up with a better pan for 'Mr Popper's Penguins' than "flightless and foul" but that would entail expending more creative energy on the film than its makers did.

Directed by Mark Waters ('Ghosts of Girlfriends Past', 'The Spiderwick Chronicles') and based on a 1938 children's book by Richard and Florence Atwater, it is so empty and artificial and formulaic that if I didn't know better, I would have pegged it as a very cynical parody, or perhaps a film within a film about some desperate mafioso's questionable money-laundering scheme.