Picture this: you get together your funniest friends to make a movie with “Airplane”-style goofy humor. Now picture your funniest friends aren’t available, so you get just a bunch of your not-quite-as-funny friends, plus that one weird neighbor from down the street, and they gamely try to save this intentionally ridiculous tale about shrinking a shark down to enter a kid’s body to eat a disease, and mostly fail.
Sample dialog:
Soldier (who looks nothing like a soldier, but we’re told she’s a soldier): “Shark attack at 1 o’clock, sir”
General: “One o’clock? That’s a long time from now. Are you psychic?”
Soldier: “No, I mean [pointing] thereabouts.”
General: “So why didn’t you just say ‘thereabouts’?”
Soldier: “It didn’t seem soldier-y.”
Now picture that dialog being delivered people who just have nothing like the comic timing or sensibility that might have allowed Leslie Nielsen to get away with it.
Funny thing is, given how utterly silly it is, the writing isn’t terrible. Leslie Nielsen probably could have pulled it off. He’s nowhere within a country mile of this, though.