REVIEW
HOLES
Starring Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight and Khleo Thomas
Directed by Andrew Davis
Opens Friday, April 18
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Holes is funny, fast-paced and much dirtier than you’d expect from a Disney film.
After the police catch Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBeouf) with a pair of missing track shoes, he’s given two choices: a term in juvenile detention, or 18 months at Camp Green Lake. "I’ve never been to camp before," says Stanley.
It’s not the camp he imagines, though. The lake is nowhere to be found, and the boys spend their days digging holes in a desert wasteland "to build character," according to Mr. Sir (Jon Voight), the camp’s disciplinarian. Little do the boys know that the digging is actually a search for a long-buried treasure.
Tailor-made for modern juvenile attention spans, Holes, adapted from the novel by author Louis Sachar, immediately throws you into Stanley Yelnats’s campy crisis. From there, the film is delicately interlaced with expository flashbacks and remembrances about Stanley’s cursed family (which includes Henry Winkler and Siobhan Fallon as mom and dad) and its colourful history, beginning with his "no-good, dirty-rotten, pig-stealing great-great-grandfather." None of the flashbacks interrupt the story, and they all flow together to a not entirely unexpected climax.
In most cases, the characters develop believably and naturally through simple, realistic dialogue. The relationship between Stanley and young orphan Zero (Khleo Thomas) is especially well-developed as they protect each other from the cruelty of the other inmates. The boys of D-Tent, though a little unoriginal, all go through some minor evolution, and not one of them is unrealistic.
The only miscast performer is Sigourney Weaver as The Warden. Even after being possessed by a demi-god in Ghostbusters, then battling aliens as Ripley in the Alien movies, she doesn’t really come across as either scary or tough in Holes. Neither her costumes nor her delivery justify Mr. Sir’s deference to her. Voight, on the other hand, is perfect as a hardened camp hard-ass, spouting absurd rhetoric in his gravelly voice while depriving the inmates of the necessities of life.
Though aimed at school-aged children, this film contains a lot of material that might bug younger kids. There’s a surprising amount of rough bullying at first by the D-Tent boys, and there’s even more blood, guns, fighting and clawing.
A short scene of interracial romance between two characters in one of the flashbacks was surprising, too. Of course, it’s the most clothes-on, legs-crossed affair in history, but it was still surprising to see all this stuff in a Disney film. These things make Holes a little too intense for younger kids, but improved it immensely for someone who was expecting typically fluffy, soft-core Disney. |
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