When the actors starring in your movie happen to be Tim Allen (he of “Home Improvement”) and Courtney Cox (she of “Friends”), it probably isn’t a good idea to include an outtake from the gag real where the former queries, “Maybe we were funnier on television?” Yes, Tim, limited theatrical success aside you both were far more successful on the small screen, and saying so at the end of the new family superhero comedy “Zoom” only hammers that irrefutable fact home.

That giant misstep aside, I can’t really throw too much else in the way of venom at Allen’s latest starring vehicle. It’s amiable enough, and for the most part small children are going to eat up the pint-sized “Spy Kids” wannabe theatrics up with a giant spoon. The morals imparted are all good ones (be true to yourself, be different is what makes us unique, family is sometimes what you make of it, loyalty and friendship in relationships are items worth striving for) and the kids at the film’s core are certainly enthusiastic performers. But there is a high been there-done that quotient, and no matter how charming some of the moments are or how surprising a couple of the performances “Zoom” is still a scratchy record I’ve personally heard one too many times before.

Deep in the heart of Area 52, militaristic General Larraby (Rip Torn) orders the resurrection of the Zenith Program, a top secret government project that back in the 1970’s helped discover and train unique youngsters destined to be superheroes. According to the group’s former scientific wizard Dr. Grant (Chevy Chase), Team Zenith’s greatest supervillain, Concussion (Kevin Zegers), is returning to Earth intent on destroying the man who vanquished him, his own younger brother Jack Shepard a.k.a. Captain Zoom (Allen).

With only eight days to find a cadre of new recruits, Grant kidnaps Shepard to help him train a team of four kids who might just be the planet’s last line of defense. But these children are a decidedly mixed lot. Overweight Tucker Williams (Spencer Breslin) can blow up parts of his body like a balloon, Summer Jones (Kate Mara) is a burgeoning telepath, Dylan West (Michael Cassidy) can make himself and the things around him appear invisible, while little seven-year-old Cindy Collins (Ryan Newman) can lift four tons without breaking a sweat.

Shepard, along with the assistance of self-professed superhero geek Dr. Marsha Holloway (Cox), is hired to help them get a handle on their powers and prepare the team to face Concussion. But the man formally known as Zoom wants to no part of this, the last time he was pressed into government service the military forcing him to use up his powers to destroy his very own flesh and blood. He’s over it, and even with the kids looking up to him as a father figure nothing is going to make this former hero amenable doing so.

If you don’t see where all this is going, than good-golly-Miss-Molly you don’t get out of the house enough. Based upon the popular book Zoom’s Academy by Jason Lethcoe, Adam Rifkin (“Mousehunt”) and David Berenbaum’s (“Elf”) script is as predictable Mom’s Thursday meatloaf, the ingredients holding the picture together so tired they should come with an already eclipsed expiration date. The whole thing is a PG-rated greatest hits collection, elements of so many other pictures popping up throughout one could almost make a game of trying to spot and catalogue them all before things run their well-known course.

Still, I can’t really be too hard on it all. Allen is in decent form and the child actors are quite charming in their own precociously eccentric ways. More so, over-familiarity aside the basic plot structure of all of this isn’t exactly awful, and in the right hands I’m almost positive “Zoom” could have ended up being a true family-friendly guilty pleasure surprise. Besides, any comedy that features a pipsqueak Hercules running around in entire wardrobe of pricelessly pink princess couture can’t be all bad, can it?

Not at all, but just because it isn’t all bad doesn’t make it all good, either. Peter Hewitt (“Garfield”) directs like he’s using a lawnmower, the film showing so little fluidity from scene to scene one could image he phoned up the Iron Chef to help him run the editing machine while assembling it. Despite some clever bits with Cindy (Newman is a doll, I couldn’t get enough of her), Hewitt manages to choke the lifeblood right out the picture. Just as things should be building to a pleasingly frenetic and fun climax, they instead implode into a banal pit of boredom and cliché impossible for the movie to climb out of, the filmmaker shooting his flick right in the foot at seemingly every step.

Part of me can’t help but wonder what would have happened had Allen’s old “Galaxy Quest” director Dean Parisot had gotten a go at this one. That sci-fi comedy was everything this one isn’t, the laughs coming a mile a minute giving the comedian the best big screen role he’s ever been lucky enough to inhabit. But “Zoom” isn’t that film, not by a mile, and the only thing super about it is how fast it exits theaters and makes its way to DVD.