Dir: Raja Gosnell. Cast: Will Arnett, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges (voice), Natasha Lyonne, Jordin Sparks, Gabriel Iglesias (voice), Shaquille O'Neal (voice), Omar Camparro, Stanley Tucci, RuPaul (voice). PG cert, 92 min

Show Dogs has one function and one alone. It’s half-term entertainment in which parents should feel comfortable falling asleep, confident that this assembly-line action-comedy about a police Rottweiler, and his trainer, going undercover at a dog show is going to supply 92 minutes of innocuous distraction.

A reviewer fears, incrementally, for these dozing adults. But for the children more. Imagine waking up at nearly any point in this thing, and grasping what you’ve voluntarily paid to subject them to. Say, the shot of Will Arnett intentionally sniffing his canine partner’s undercarriage. Or to hear the tiger – there is, for some reason, a tiger – with a hilaracist Life of Pi accent.

Show Dogs goes out of its way to cause offence, be weird, and not contain a single joke that humans of any age might rationally nod and appreciate. On basic levels of comedic facility, it makes K9 and Turner and Hooch – that venerable double-bill of 1989 cop-and-dog buddy flicks – look positively Shakespearean.

But there’s also a great deal more in it to confuse and disturb. The Rottweiler, Max, is scary, tough, black, and therefore voiced by Chris “Ludacris” Bridges. He likes rap. Arnett’s character is more of an Elvis guy. Their mission is to rescue a stolen baby panda, which animal smugglers are using the dog show as cover to export. The animals talk, but people just hear them yapping.

Fine. We can go along with all this – we did in Babe, after all. But why is RuPaul, complete with “sashay away” catchphrase from Drag Race, given a cameo as some freaky, gender-indeterminate Southern belle creature with ratty little braids, whose come-ons Max finds terrifying? This is transphobia for toddlers, surely.

The worst – an insane scene for which the filmmakers have already had to issue formal apologies – is yet to come. To train Max for the judging session, Arnett’s Frank shows him what’s likely to happen, and literally gropes his testicles. The dog angrily recoils. But the next time, Max is coached to go to a Zen place, a fantasy place of happy frolics in the sky amid stars and sequins, while there’s a human hand insidiously touching his privates.

Wake up during this sequence, and most parents would justifiably assume they’d just segued into their worst nightmare, joining the dots in slumber between two very distinct definitions of grooming. How any one of the film’s dozen uncredited screenwriters – let alone a floundering Arnett, or the focus-puller, the entire sound crew, or director Raja (Scooby Doo) Gosnell – thought the scene was a good idea is fairly inexplicable.

But this is Show Dogs all over: an emergency babysitter who arrives in the clown costume from Stephen King’s IT, and expects you not to notice.