I'm struggling with my thoughts on "The Producers." Here is a movie that accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is always a good thing, yet its goals and aspirations are so far from ambitious that I'm left wondering whether or not it even had to be made.

I'm no snob when it comes to movies, but I'm puzzled as to why anybody would want to make a so-so movie version of a so-so Broadway musical — which itself was based on a so-so 1967 Mel Brooks movie. Are we that starved for ideas?

Very simply, this is a movie designed to make people chuckle (it's too tame to actually make you want to laugh) and feel good. It is a movie made to be seen in one of those mall mega-theaters at the end of a long day of holiday shopping with your family. You all shuffle in, fight over what candies to get, dump your purchases on the sticky floor, slump down and bask in the glow of the screen, all the while wondering when you're going to start wrapping presents.

Everybody will emerge from the theater two hours later sort of happy, but not really satisfied. There's no question, it'll give you a nice little buzz and you'll probably be happier coming out of "The Producers" than you were going into it, but other than that, it doesn't give you any sustenance. It's cinematic Diet Coke.

Did the movie have this effect on me? Yes, it did. I left happy, but then it quickly faded from my memory. I'm trying to remember some things — good or bad — about it for this review, but it's tough. I stopped taking notes about 10 minutes in — it just didn't seem worth the effort.

None of the jokes or the songs were good or bad enough that I especially remembered them afterward. I remember thinking Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick had some nice chemistry together as scheming Broadway producers Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, who set out to rip off their investors by staging the worst play ever; however, I also thought the two leads weren't on the same page as much as I would have expected, considering they played the same roles on Broadway years earlier.

I thought Will Ferrell was pretty funny as the unstable Nazi author of the opus "Springtime for Hitler." I also remember thinking that he looked really thin. Not sure why that popped into my mind. I also remember Uma Thurman was in the movie and spoke with a heavy Swedish accent, but then, when she sang her songs, she dropped the accent, which for some reason struck me as funny, although I'm not sure director Susan Stroman intended it to be. Unlike Ferrell, Thurman did not look very thin.

I'm being snide, of course, but movies like "The Producers" invite snideness. The movie has a certain charm to it that makes it impossible to totally dislike. This will be enough for the kind of people who don't go to the movies to be stimulated, informed or challenged, but rather to see something nice. There's something to be said for this, I suppose, but in a holiday movie season packed with wonderful offerings like "Match Point," "The Squid and the Whale," "The Matador," "King Kong" and countless other entertaining and provocative films, seeing "The Producers" is practically admitting defeat.

Rating: 2 out of 5