Poitier gets Punk’d

In 1967, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” starred Sidney Poitier as a young man meeting his white girlfriend’s parents, and built up to a gentle plea for colorblind romance. In 2005, “Guess Who” stars Ashton Kutcher as a young man meeting his black girlfriend’s parents, and builds up to a slapstick go-kart race with daddy Bernie Mac.

Whether that’s a better example of how far race relations have come or of how low movies have fallen is an interesting question to consider.

“Guess Who,” alas, isn’t a very interesting movie. A lightly race- charged version of “Meet the Parents,” it’s mostly built around sitcom assumptions about married life.

Men are bellowing; children need to be humored. Women are the true bosses who are always, always right. The whispery noises you hear in the background are the cobwebs being dusted off a “Life of Riley” script.

Of course, an engaging performer can sometimes redeem bad material, and “Guess Who” has a couple.

Although Kutcher remains a flat actor – and, tabloid stories apart, an oddly sexless leading man – he’s a good physical comedian. He handles pratfalls and slapstick with aplomb and one sudden, spasmodic jump-for-joy near the end of the movie is nearly perfect.

As for co-star Mac, he’s one of those rare comics – W.C. Fields, John Cleese and Billy Connolly are his odd-couple colleagues – able to find the comedy in rage. Even at his most relaxed, the man looks ready to burst a blood vessel, and his slow burns are priceless.

Yet this remake – which doesn’t acknowledge the earlier film, and retains nothing of it beyond its central situations and part of its title – remains fairly slow going.

The original “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” had one great scene, mostly for behind-the-scene reasons – Spencer Tracy, talking about the power of love, as Katharine Hepburn stared at him with tearful adoration.

“Guess Who” has one great scene too, when Mac goads Kutcher into telling a “black” joke. The boy offers one harmless example. Mac asks for another. And another. And eventually – the audience squirming all the while – Kutcher stumbles into telling a genuinely racist one, and the table erupts.

It’s a smart scene and a successful one, because there’s a point behind the joke – the way that one thing leads to another, and how the swamp of bias and stereotype can lie just under the surface of supposedly all-in-good-fun joshing. For that point, briefly, “Guess Who” actually becomes about something.

But then the movie switches back to sitcom mode.

For the most part, “Guess Who” is an inoffensive enough movie. It provides a few small smiles. But it should have trusted itself and dared more.

Or is it accidental that the part of the white boy’s fiancee is played by Zoe Saldana, a Dominican- American actress with soft, straight hair? (Meanwhile the African-American actress Kellee Stewart, who has tight curls, has to settle for the comic part of her sassy, sexy sister.)

And is it merely an oversight that at no time are Kutcher and Saldana – who supposedly are playing people who live together, and have just gotten engaged – ever shown doing more than exchanging a quick, polite kiss?

In some ways, “Guess Who” shows how much we’ve changed in 38 years. But in the most important ways, it shows how Hollywood’s barely changed at all.