Hoot, based on the Newbury Award-winning young adult novel by bestselling author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen. That’s right, folks: greedy land developers. (Insert loud booing here.) Even this justifiably loathsome antagonist, though, can’t completely rescue Hoot, a sincere but muddled family film.
Hoot’s
story centers on perpetual new kid on the block Roy Eberhart (Logan
Lerman), a newcomer to the small coastal burg of Coconut Grove,
Florida, who finds his first day of middle school rudely interrupted by
chubby bully Dana Matherson (Eric Phillips). His face squashed up
against the school bus window, Roy sees a mysterious, blonde-haired,
barefoot kid, later to be known as “Mullet Fingers” (Cody Linley), go
streaking by outside. Roy is captivated by the kid’s blinding speed,
and the fact that he’s apparently a vagrant, since no one at school
knows him. No one, that is, except Beatrice Leep (Brie Larson), who
only further excites Roy’s curiosity by warning him to stay away.
Parallel to this intrigue is the story of a plot of land marked for
development, the future site of a new chain-restaurant pancake house.
The area is beset with vandalism, causing no small amount of
consternation for regional manager Chuck Muckle (Clark Gregg) and Curly
Branitt (Tim Blake Nelson), his dim-bulb man on the ground. Local
deputy David Delinko (Luke Wilson) is assigned to investigate, but he
falls asleep in his squad car one night on a stakeout, and wakes up to
find his windows spray-painted black. Demoted by his captain and
derided by his peers, Delinko stays on the case, determined to get to
the bottom of the mystery, which turns out to involve an endangered
species of subterranean owls. As Muckle presses forward with plans to
bulldoze the lot, can Roy and his new friends avoid capture, raise
proper awareness and save the day for their new little feathered
friends?
Satirist Hiaasen, who previously suffered the indignity of Hollywood’s adaptation of his novel Striptease,
works in much simpler and more earnest strokes here, but he’s done few
favors by the adaptation and direction of Wil Shriner, a lauded sitcom
veteran making his feature debut. Perhaps the challenges of working on
location and frequently outdoors proved taxing on Shriner’s grasp of
the big picture, because many of the adult performances are broad
and/or unfocused, seemingly copped from different pages, tonally
speaking. Hiaasen’s fellow Floridian Jimmy Buffet contributes five
ukulele-influenced tunes for the soundtrack, and cameos as a laidback
science teacher, but the film is otherwise slow-pitched at a much
younger demographic.
What Hoot does have going for it, though, is Lerman, who makes me almost wish I’d paid attention to UPN’s Jack & Bobby
before it got axed. Relaxed and naturally charismatic, he suffers
serial abuse (his parents make him write bully Dana a letter of
apology) with aplomb. If the other characters are kind of wan and
familiar and the film’s plot twists dutiful, you at least never get
tired of having Lerman as your guide. (New Line, PG, 89 mins.)