DEATH AT A FUNERAL (15).

Comedy. Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Zoe Saldana, James Marsden, Tracy Morgan, Luke Wilson, Danny Glover, Regina Hall, Peter Dinklage, Loretta Devine, Keith David.

Remakes have become the scourge of a Hollywood system starved of creativity and imagination.

No sooner has a subtitled film won critical plaudits than there are whispers of an English language retread.

Now it seems that British films simply aren’t good enough for audiences across the Atlantic because director Neil LaBute has remade the 2007 comedy of errors, Death At A Funeral, transplanting the action to a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles.

Dean Craig, who penned the original screenplay, tweaks the dialogue.

In the original, the grieving widow rebuffs the umpteenth offer of Earl Grey with a derisory, “Tea can do many things dear, but it can't bring back the dead!”

Across the Atlantic, the tea is replaced with a hot cup of java: “Coffee may do many things, but it cannot bring back the dead!”

However, Craig does not change the plot or the thinly sketchy characters. It’s a thoroughly pointless exercise.

Death At A Funeral will be of no interest to audiences who saw the original film and suffered the loopy contrivances in Craig’s ramshackle script.

The whiff of homophobia in the British version becomes an eye-watering stench here as the family wrestles with revelations about one character’s alleged homosexuality.

Marsden embraces his slapstick role with gusto, stripping off for a set piece on the roof after telling the assembled mourners: “The coffin is moving!”

Alas, LaBute’s film is as lifeless as the patriarch at the centre of the recriminations.