John Hughes used to make movies about alienated teenagers (The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) but now he is more likely to make movies that will alienate them.

Since the enormous, runaway success of Home Alone, which he wrote and produced, he has been attempting to flood the film world with cute, trouble-making pre-pubescents. Curly Sue and the brat in Driving Me Crazy failed to catch on but that hasn't stopped him. Mason Gamble is a blonde infant so young and wide eyed he makes Macaulay Culkin look over the hill, and Hughes has gambled that he can turn Gamble into the next pre-school sensation in a Home Alone retread without the dysfunctional family.

In America Dennis is appended with his nickname The Menace, but on this side of the Atlantic we know what a menace to society really is. There is nothing cute about the Beano's Dennis The Menace, who can look forward to a long time in jail if his comic strip creators ever let him grow up. This, after some wrangling about the name, is Just Dennis, as featured in The Irish Press, who means no harm. He is a holy terror, an innocent who leave chaos in his wake.

In this respect he differs even from Culkin in Home Alone, who gleefully plots the painful assaults on his burglars. Hughes gives Dennis a burglar to deal with too, Christopher Lloyd hamming it up like a Victorian villain, but Dennis only wants to help him, presaging the expected painful dose of violent slapstick. The end result does not have the pure comic malice of the Home Alone series, being curiously more likeable and less amusing.

Director Nick Castle follows Hughes formulas with as many stylish flourishes as he can manage, but, as might be expected on a film drawn from a daily comic strip, it is an episodic, rambling little movie. He is aided by a towering comic performance from Walther Matthau as the hard done by neighbour suffering continual accident and indignity at the hands of a moppet he (and no doubt many begrudging adults in the audience) will find less than appealing.

The greatest indignity for an old pro like Matthau must be playing third fiddle to a child and his dog. But that's demographics, which is all the creators of Dennis are really interested in.