HOLES HAS SOME

April 2024 · 3 minute read

HOLES []

Empty at the center. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated PG (violence, mild profanity). At the AMC Empire, the Loews Lincoln Square, the Loews Orpheum, others.

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THERE are no happy campers, much less a lake, at Camp Green Lake, where juvenile offenders spend their days digging in the barren Texas desert in “Holes,” as bizarre a children’s movie as Disney has ever made.

The palindromic Stanley Yelnats (newcomer Shia LaBeouf), sentenced to 18 months at Green Lake after being wrongly convicted of stealing a famous basketball player’s sneakers, is told that his daily requirement of digging a 5-foot hole is designed to build character.

But when Stanley finds a mysterious cylinder in the sand, it becomes clear that the camp’s eccentric overseers have been using the boys to search for something valuable.

There’s the no-nonsense Warden (Sigourney Weaver), who paints her nails with polish containing snake venom; her pompadored, sadistic assistant, Mr. Sir (Jon Voight); and Dr. Pendranski (Tim Blake Nelson), who claims to be a psychologist and seems to be in need of one himself.

Beware of movies that have characters with funny names, and Stanley’s fellow inmates – all boys – have monikers like Zero (Khleo Thomas), Squid (Jake M. Smith), Barfbag (Zane Holtz) and Lump (Steve Kozlowski).

We meet them briefly and then are launched into a parallel story line set a century earlier in Green Lake when it had water – and in Latvia, where Stanley’s great-great-grandfather had a bad-luck curse placed on him by a gypsy (Eartha Kitt).

In America, Stanley’s great-grandfather meets up with Kissin’ Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette), a stagecoach robber and unabashed killer.

Kate was a schoolteacher before she turned to crime in the wake of the brutal killing of Sam (Dule Hill), a mystical black man who made the mistake of kissing her in front of the local rednecks.

These lengthy flashbacks – and scenes of Stanley’s immediate family, headed by Henry Winkler, a hapless inventor – tend to stop the already slow-moving story in its tracks.

Director Andrew Davis, who never establishes a consistent tone as the movie lurches from mystical to whimsical to jarringly realistic, reportedly insisted that Louis Sachar adapt his prize-winning young adult novel for the screen.

There’s a good reason authors rarely do the screenplays for films based on their books; “Holes” suffers even more than the Harry Potter films from a compulsion to be faithful to the source material, including cramming in a head-spinning assortment of characters and subplots.

LeBeouf, vaguely reminiscent of a young Mark Linn-Baker, can’t quite muster the presence needed to hold together this convoluted yarn. He is consistently outshone by Thomas’ Zero and the older actors – though all of them, save Weaver, have been directed to mug egregiously.

“Holes” clocks in at nearly two hours. It’s a long, slow slog through the desert, best appreciated by fans of the book.

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