The Bernie Mac-Ashton Kutcher comedy “Guess Who” is a remake, though probably not of the movie you’d expect. It’s true that its title is a play on the 1967 Poitier-Hepburn-Tracy classic “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” and its setup an inversion of that film’s premise: This time the young lady is bringing a white boyfriend home to meet her black family. But “Guess Who” gets this joke out of the way within the first 15 minutes, and from that point bears little resemblance to its politically daring but dramatically stilted predecessor.

From the moment the boyfriend arrives in suburban New Jersey and meets his prospective father-in-law, the operative model for the movie isn’t “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s “Meet the Parents,” substituting Mr. Mac for Robert De Niro as the overprotective, intimidating dad, and Mr. Kutcher for Ben Stiller as the nervous, bumbling beau.

The movie opens with hotshot young stockbroker Simon Green (Mr. Kutcher) quitting his job due to an ethical disagreement with his boss – over what exactly, we won’t learn until near the end of the film. Coincidentally, this is the very day he and his girlfriend Theresa (Zoe Saldana) are going to her parents’ house for the weekend. The folks are throwing a party at which they’ll renew their vows, and Theresa thinks it will be the perfect opportunity to announce that she and Simon are engaged.

Not wanting to start the weekend off on an awkward note, Simon doesn’t mention his lost job. Theresa, meanwhile, hasn’t told her family that the fella she’s bringing home with her is, as he puts it, “pigment-challenged.” “I didn’t mention it,” she explains blithely, “because I don’t think it’s going to matter.”

It matters. Their arrival at the house is greeted with a series of comic misunderstandings: Her father, Percy (Mr. Mac), mistakes Simon for a cab driver; her younger sister Keisha (Kellee Stewart) takes him for an accountant. (“Oh my God,” she cries upon walking in the front door and seeing him, “are we being audited?”) When Simon’s identity is finally established, Theresa’s mom (Jonelle Kennedy) is fine with it. Percy, not so much.

The boy seems shady to him, and not without reason. Within minutes, an eager-to-impress Simon has told extravagant tales of his career as a Nascar driver. (Percy turns out to be the sport’s only known black fan.) Moments later, Percy walks in on Simon horsing around in Theresa’s negligee. After trying unsuccessfully to exile Simon to a hotel, Percy instead banishes him to the basement. There, the wary father will maintain his surveillance of the young man by sharing the foldout bed with him. “I don’t want to hear about you sleeping with my daughter,” Percy explains after an ill-advised late-night admission from Simon. “You’re sleeping with me now.”

Over the next two days, the men will share not only a blanket, but a series of deceits – Simon continues to pretend he has a job, Percy tells co-workers that his daughter’s squeeze is a Howard University basketball star and friend of the Cosbys – in addition to a nearly fatal go-cart competition, a drunken game of living-room football, and the (temporary) loss of their fed up women.

For all the movies’ similarities, “Guess Who” is more likable than “Meet the Parents,” its pace a little less manic and its tone a little less cruel. There are no humiliatingly tiny Speedos, accidental arsons, or lost pets. This is partly due, I imagine, to the absence of Ben Stiller and his odd penchant for cinematic masochism. But the film also doesn’t need to reach so far for laughs because its interracial premise opens up a world of comic opportunity.

After Percy first meets Simon, for instance, every song he can find on the radio seems designed to increase his agitation, from “Brother Louie” (“She was black as the night, Louie was whiter than white”) to “Walk on the Wild Side” (“And the colored girls go”) to, of course, “Ebony and Ivory.” The centerpiece of the movie is a family dinner at which Simon, egged on by Percy, tells a number of relatively inoffensive black jokes – e.g., “What do you call one black man being chased by a hundred white men?” “The PGA Tour” – before accidentally offering up an ugly one, with predictable consequences.

Mr. Kutcher is an agreeable enough Simon (though he offers little sign of being the financial whiz kid everyone keeps calling him), and the rest of the cast is similarly solid. But from the beginning, “Guess Who” is Bernie Mac’s movie. He’s firmly in his comic element as the aggrieved (racially and otherwise) father, his goggle eyes perpetually on the verge of exploding right out of his head. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, when he gives Simon a glare, it ought to stick 4 inches out of the young man’s back. As in most of Mr. Mac’s performances, there’s an underlying menace to his humor, but never enough to interfere with the movie’s light tone. It is, after all, a comedy.

Unfortunately, the movie forgets this toward the end. The complication of Theresa and her mother abandoning their men is not particularly comic and is extended far too long. At one point, an angry Theresa tells Simon, “I can’t believe you’re trying to be funny.” To which a filmgoer might be inclined to respond: I can’t believe you’re not.

Then there is the obligatory message portion of the movie, brief but nonetheless tiresome, when it pats itself on the back for declaring that skin color shouldn’t matter – a moral that hasn’t been controversial in Hollywood since before its romantic leads were born. This self-congratulation might seem a little less pious if the movie showed greater political foresight elsewhere. But “Guess Who” succumbs to the same disappointing stereotypes that plague the rest of popular culture – the black female lead who has straight hair and light skin (but whose sister is darker and kinky-haired), the swishy event planner who helps with the parents’ party.

The movie tries to dodge the implications of the latter by announcing that he’s not actually gay, just a “metrosexual.” But the caricature is inescapable, and while it’s not mean-spirited, it’s still retrograde: He flips his wrist, says things like “in a shake of a lamb’s tale,” and tries to get Percy to undress in front of him. From a movie that in its central dinner-table scene makes such a fuss about the difference between laughing with and laughing at, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect more.