“He stole the money,” says the teaser, “… and he’s not giving it back!” We are supposed to infer that the thief in question is the marsupial in sunglasses pictured in the ad for “Kangaroo Jack.” But the greater culprit is the man whose name rests proudly above the title, producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

According to a studio release, Bruckheimer’s movies have brought in a total of $12.5 billion in worldwide box office. That’s a pretty impressive haul for masterminding such shameless scams as “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “Con Air.”

Who could argue with such a knack for gaudy cheap tricks? Certainly not the army of yes-men who green-lighted Bruckheimer’s “Kangaroo Jack,” 88 minutes of desperate gyrations intended to simulate humor.

And certainly not Jerry O’Connell and Anthony Anderson, two blandly unfunny young actors who have been hired to babysit the audience for the duration. O’Connell and Anderson play longtime Brooklyn chums Charlie Carbone and Louis Fucci, respectively a career hairdresser and a street hustler whose nutty schemes are always getting them into trouble.

A prelude gives us some backstory on how Charlie earned the lifelong gratitude of Louis as a kid in 1982, but the script stops short of explaining how the African American Louis came upon his Italian American roots.

Instead we are vaulted forward to the present, when Louis’ latest bit of tomfoolery lands the pair in hot water with the neighborhood mob boss, Charlie’s stepfather, Sal. Beyond his crooked business dealings, the colorful Sal is also a linguist manqu, who confuses the words “plethora” and “anathema” when he gets his dander up.

It doesn’t get any better. To get the bungling duo far from harm’s way, Sal ships Charlie and Louis off to Australia to deliver $50,000 to a connection down under.

But the dough ends up on the person of a mean-spirited kangaroo, who first whacks Charlie with a martial-arts kick to the chin, then hightails it into the Outback with the cash. The chase is on.

As the two stars make like a wax museum Abbott and Costello, they go up against a series of typical Outback challenges in pursuit of their kangaroo: sandstorms, marauding ants, flatulent camels and a voluptuous park service worker from Milwaukee named Jessie (Estella Warren, pressed from the voluptuous blond mold).

After a hostile “meet-cute” first encounter, Jessie and Charlie take time out for a romantic “Blue Lagoon” -style dip beneath a waterfall, allowing us to catch our breath from the onslaught of hilarious high jinks.