Not even the charm and chemistry of Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore can lift this Danny De Vito-directed film above the average.

Duplex centres on Alex and Nancy, a young couple who buy an apartment in Brooklyn which has everything they wanted. The only catch is that a little old lady (Eileen Essell) lives in the room above and, in terms of the purchase agreement, cannot be evicted. But having been assured by the estate agent (Harvey Fierstein) that the old woman is ill and close to croaking, Alex and Nancy are prepared to put up with her for a while.

All goes well but within days the tenant seems to get healthier and starts making a nuisance of herself. The problems begin when she starts constantly pestering Alex, a writer who has only a few days to meet the deadline of turning in his completed second novel to his uncompromising publisher, played by Swoosie Kurtz.

Then the tenant starts to keep Alex and Nancy awake at night with her deafeningly loud television set and things start to go wrong and from bad to worse, a situation exacerbated by the local cop constantly taking the old woman's side.

There seems to be no alternative but to kill the tenant - and this is when Duplex, shown in the UK as Our House, starts to slip and get increasingly silly.

And one can anticipate the twist at the end less than 20 minutes into the film. DeVito, who proved he can throw a good comic punch as a director with the dark-toned War of the Roses and Throw Momma From the Train, is simply not on form in an unremarkable comedy that went belly-up at the US box-office. It also gets a rating of 6/10. - Billy Suter