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At the Movies
with Mark Moorehead

Holes

General Audiences:  C+

Disney is targeting 12- to 16-year-olds in this convoluted, four-tales-in-one film staged at a disciplinary camp for boys in the middle of the Texas desert. Mild language, rated PG.  

Family Audiences:  C+

I counted a couple of bad words and the violence consists of a few fist fights. My seven- year-old said the movie was a bit long (2 hours) and thought there were too many flashback scenes. However, he liked the movie overall and gave it a “B”.  I think he’s a tad too generous.   

 

Holes says it all: There are too many of them. What starts out as good-boys-in-a-bad- place buddy film degenerates into four separate and somewhat disjointed stories, each occupying a different era. While this technique works fine for a more sophisticated audience watching, for example, The Hours, the effort is lost on a young teen audience wondering what he heck is going on when the film unexpectedly cuts from a modern-day boys camp in Texas to a 19th century pig farm in Latvia.

Our story begins with a young Stanley Yelnats IV (played by Shia LaBeouf) walking down the street, being struck in the head by a pair of stolen athletic shoes and soon being found guilty of petty theft. 

He is sentenced to serve 18 months in a state-run work camp for bad boys in the hot, barren desert of western Texas. Texas is tough on first time offenders. However, just before Stanley arrives at the camp from hell, the film flashes between various contemporary and historical scenes of the Yelnats family spanning more than 100 years. It feels like you’re sitting through a low-budget version of Back To The Future II.

There is a point to all this time travel, based on Louis Sachar’s novel Holes. It seems Stanley is the last male in the Yelnats family to suffer the curse of his no-good, dirty-rotten, pig-stealing great-great-grandfather.  

Director Andrew Davis takes us back in time to show us the origin of the family curse (the first story), then a bit of bad luck by the next generation of the Yelnats during a stage coach robbery (the second story), then to yet another predicable epistle of a 19th Century blond schoolteacher’s romance with a Black peddler (third story), and finally to the present day Yelnats family struggling to make ends meet while Stanley does his stint at a juvenile prison camp (fourth story).

What does work for Holes are scenes at the camp where 10 characters are just waiting to be developed. And several of them actually are. 

The camp’s warden (played by Sigourney Weaver), “Mr. Sir” (Jon Voight) and Dr. Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson) provide moments of pain and laughter. Stanley and his tongue-tied camp buddy Zero (Khleo Thomas) grab most of our attention--and sympathy--in their bid for freedom and redemption.

Zero, in the final analysis, turns out to be the real hero in this film.

And yet one more viewpoint: I asked my seven-year-old for his analysis of the film. He said, “It’s a story about some boys at a prison camp that should not be there and some boys who should be there. And it has a happy ending.”

You’ll have to see the movie to fill in the rest of the holes.

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