ALERT VIEWER College Road Trip: Comedy. Directed by Roger Kumble. With Martin Lawrence, Raven-Symoné and Donny Osmond. (G. 83 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

"College Road Trip" is Disney's attempt to put Martin Lawrence, usually associated with a more robust brand of comedy, in a family-friendly, G-rated picture. The result is mixed at best. There's a nice pro-education theme struggling to emerge from oceans of clumsy humor here, so let's be generous and say the movie deserves about a C-minus.

Lawrence's co-star is Raven-Symoné, the young veteran of "The Cosby Show" and various Disney ventures, including her starring vehicle "That's So Raven." Her background offers a clue to "College Road Trip": It boils down to a TV episode boosted to feature length, with slapstick and heart-tugging filler - fine for the Disney Channel, but thin stuff in a movie theater.

James (Lawrence), the police chief in a small town near Chicago, is a control freak who wants his bright, beloved daughter, Melanie (Raven-Symoné), to attend college nearby, the better to keep an eye on her. He pushes hard for Northwestern, but Melanie has another idea, namely Georgetown, which happens to have the perfect prelaw program she's looking for.

The opening sequences establish Melanie's home life: Her mom (Kym E. Whitley) is a sensible type, her little brother (Eshaya Draper) an oddball science genius and the family's pet pig has, of course, a penchant for getting into comic scrapes. (P.S.: If pig humor isn't your cup of tea, this may not be the best movie for you.)

Most of the story depicts the road trip taken by James and Melanie to visit various campuses. James plots to keep his little girl close to home, but his antics simply end up mortifying her. After much ham-handed drollery, dad and daughter begin to understand each other, and the film winds down on a positive, G-rated note.

The problem is that, in padding out this skimpy material, director Roger Kumble ("The Sweetest Thing") relies on slapstick scenes that are neither essential nor especially clever. An example is when Lawrence and company make mincemeat out of a wedding party, where the humor is on the pie-fight level.

There's much more of this, and it pops up with depressing regularity: dumb comedy involving floodlights, a ladder, jumping on a bed, a stun gun, a water obstacle on a golf course and skydiving.

On the positive side, Donny Osmond pops up as a dorky dad who's making the college rounds with his equally maladroit daughter (Margo Harshman). Osmond isn't much of an actor, but seems to be having a ball playing around with his white-bread image.