MOVIE REVIEW

Teen turmoil falls flatter than a pancake.

By Jan Stuart, Newsday

Any kid who has been shuttled from home to home as the result of a parent's job should understand the particular angst of Roy Eberhardt.

He's barely settled into Montana at the beginning of "Hoot" when he's uprooted to Florida, his 10th locale in 14 years. As Roy confides, he is reminded how every new school experience can be different, yet oddly the same. One can't help feel something akin regarding "Hoot," which takes a subject as unusual to youth audiences as ecoterrorism and makes of it something insistently generic.

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What does Roy (Logan Lerman) rediscover when he arrives in Florida? That bullies are as big and fat as they are always portrayed, that his parents are as weirdly oblivious to his suffering as parents in kids' movies invariably are and that almost everyone who is not Roy Eberhardt is either loud or rude or incredibly stupid.

The stupid sobriquet goes to Officer David Delinko (Luke Wilson), an inept policeman assigned to patrol a planned Pancake House site that seems to be hitting a lot of roadblocks.

The loud representative is building foreman Curly Branitt (Tim Blake Nelson, affecting his best Don Knotts yahoo bellow), who is stymied in his efforts to keep the Pancake House site from being vandalized.

The rude honors are split between bully Dana (Eric Phillips) and soccer champ Beatrice (Brie Larson), who can out-whup Dana and who gives Roy a hard time from the get-go.

Beatrice is trying to throw Roy off the scent of a mysterious blond teenager named Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley), who is always chasing about in bare feet. You can run, but you can't hide from a name like Mullet Fingers.

What does any of this have to do with ecoterrorism? There are owls nesting on the property of the planned Pancake House. Dumb cops and fat bullies notwithstanding, there are enough odd elements at the story's core to separate it from the flock of teen-hero adventures.

But any charm and character ascribed to Carl Hiaasen's bestselling book have been homogenized in Wil Shriner's flat screenplay and direction.

'Hoot'

MPAA rating: PG for mild bullying and brief language

A New Line Cinema release. Director WilÖ Shriner. Screenplay Shriner, based on the novel by Carl Hiaasen. Producers Frank Marshall, Jimmy Buffett. Director of photography Michael Chapman. Editor Alan Edward Bell.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

In general release.