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.)

Michelle Monaghan), a nurse who believes Hunt works for the Department of Transportation. They’re engaged (crazy in love,
you see!), but when a former agent trainee (Keri Russell) gets nabbed
by sadistic and elusive arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour
Hoffman), Hunt finds himself — at the behest of his friend and
immediate boss, John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) — coerced back into
action.

After a botched extraction operation in Germany, Hunt comes across
some intel that places Davian in Vatican City the following evening, so
he takes the further ennobling step of intensely tearing up and
arranging a quickie marriage (at the hospital where Julia works?)
before re-teaming with a squad of faces both old and new (Ving Rhames,
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q) to intercept a highly expensive
weapon known only by its code name, the “Rabbit’s Foot.” Keeping
Impossible Missions Force Chief Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne)
out of the loop, Hunt kidnaps Davian, only to have him escape before he
can get him all the way back to IMF headquarters in suburban Virginia.
From there, a timed and tense game of cat and mouse ensues, with Davian
endangering Julia and Hunt literally racing around the globe to
retrieve the items he needs in order to ensure his new bride’s safe
return.

Scripted by Abrams and his fellow Alias scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, M:i:III
is crisp in its shorthand and confident in its action staging, which
include a Shanghai high-rise siege, Davian’s high-octane escape and the
breach of the Vatican. In compressing for feature film length the sort
of head feints and twists that might play best over a full season of
episodic television, though, the film suffers significant pains. (It
also, during a climactic revelation, suffers a rather unfortunate,
howlingly delusional line of dialogue given the current state of world
affairs.) There’s a cool detachment to the self-contained and
self-absorbed narrative, with the chief irony being that the more
complicated the plot gets, the more emasculated Hoffman is as a
villain. Davian is a bad man, but as rendered here a bit of, if not a
herring, then at least a resolutely indefinable entity. The more
conspiratorial collusion Hunt uncovers, the absolute less sense some of
the actions of Davian and others make.

Lest I be derided as a killjoy, it must be stressed that M:i:III
generally hits all its beats, both dutifully and robustly. It’s a
well-made film. While none of the action sequences quite measure up to
the Langley computer-room break-in of Brian De Palma’s original, and
they eventually additionally reach a point of critical mass; you at
least leave M:i:III entertained — if exhausted and chuckling a bit at the sheer, maniacal and exposed effort of its spectacle. (Paramount, PG-13, 125 mins.)