20th Century Fox has long been the go-to studio when it comes to primate entertainment ("Planet of the Apes"), but it had little to do with the animated offering "Space Chimps," other than agreeing to distribute it.

"Space Chimps" comes from Starz Media, the company responsible for the talking baseball in "Everyone's Hero" and the gabby vegetables in the last VeggieTales movie. Talking chimps could be considered a leap forward, but it's hard to equate progress with a movie that gets its best joke from riffing on the theme song from "Beverly Hills Cop."

Then again, taking in the movie's crude animation, maybe the whole '80s thing is part of the design aesthetic. That or it's meant to illustrate the infinite monkey theorem, as a roomful of typing monkeys (or chimps, since they are apes) could come up with jokes funnier than anything found here.

The movie follows a crew of three chimps sent to the planet Malgor to recover a missing space probe. Said probe has been appropriated by an evil alien dictator named Zartog to enslave a race of creatures resembling potbellied, reptilian Smurfs.

"Simpsons" fans know simians can be plenty funny. But here, the talking chimps (voiced by Andy Samberg, Cheryl Hines and Patrick Warburton, who must be under some contractual obligation to lend his voice to every animated project) aren't so much apes as evolved humans. Not evolved in the sense that they're intelligent or interesting. They just bear

The movie could be about koala bears or unicorns or leprechauns with just a few small revisions to the screenplay.

Between this and "Speed Racer's" Chim Chim, I think we owe our primate cousins an apology.

At the very least, send a fruit bouquet.