AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HYPED ENOUGH.

Byline: ROBERT BENZIKER I FOR THE NEW MEXICAN 

Ain't no mountain hyped enough

Robert Benziker I For The New Mexican

Race to Witch Mountain, family adventure, rated PG, Regal Stadium 14, 424-6296, 1 chile

Disney's 1975 film Escape to Witch Mountain was a cute little fable of a man who meets two children on the run and helps them find their way home. This proves to be quite the challenge, as the kids are aliens with strange powers, and their home is in outer space, by way of Witch Mountain. Although everyone remembers the flying RV, the film isn't exactly a classic. Like many of the live-action Disney movies of the 1950s and '60s, everyone recalls Witch Mountain fondly, but very few people revere it.

Apparently, that's the right formula for a remake: parents with lingering fondness can bring their kids to the whiz-bang remake, and the filmmakers don't have to worry about tampering with a classic. So here's Race to Witch Mountain, another uninspired remake of an old Disney movie -- a fast-food film devoid of flavor (not to mention nutritional content) to go with Robin Williams' 1997 The Absent-Minded Professor remake, Flubber, and Tim Allen's 2006 take on The Shaggy Dog.

Dwayne "don't call me The Rock" Johnson stars

as Jack Bruno, a Las Vegas cab driver who is trying

to get out of the world of organized crime while a powerful mob boss keeps trying to pull him back in. When Jack starts his shift one morning, he is surprised to find two children named Sara and Seth already in the back seat. The kids are played by the wonderful AnnaSophia Robb (The Bridge to Terabithia) and the fairly dull Alexander Ludwig (The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising).

But are they human kids? They talk in the stiff manner that movie writers often assign to aliens: their sentences are stripped of

contractions and full of ten-dollar words, and their characters are

free from the shackles of personality. Even though they hand Bruno a wad of cash, take him to some sort of goofy UFO site, and use super powers to help him evade the mobsters, poor Bruno doesn't figure out that they're extraterrestrials until Sara levitates the coins and CDs in his car. She explains to him that humans can't do that because they don't use enough of their brain power. Bruno fires back, "No, we don't do it because it's creepy!" It's one of many attempts at humor that land with a thud.

Bruno and the kids quickly find themselves on the run from the gangsters, the feds (who covet alien powers and technology), and some sort of evil space soldier who wants something or other -- and with this much overkill, who really cares what it is? I was further confused by the fact that they didn't show the alien soldier's face until two-thirds of the way into the picture, as if it were some big mystery and not a fairly standard helmet straight out of an Xbox game.

All the gathering forces collide at a science-fiction convention in Las Vegas, where familiar cliches about sci-fi geeks are trotted out yet again and any attempts at self-referential humor fizzle out like a lightsaber that has gone through the wash. At the convention, the heroes enlist the aid of Dr. Alex Friedman (Carla Gugino), a scientist who, like Agent Mulder of The X-Files, wants to believe. They also get a sci-fi writer named Dr. Donald Harlan -- the character, apparently named for Harlan Ellison, is perplexingly portrayed by a hammy Garry Marshall -- to lend them his RV. And after that, well, they'll be coming around Witch Mountain when they come.

Johnson seems like a perfect choice for this kind of movie. He is capable of being tough and harmless at once, has a terrific grasp of comic timing, and possesses an array of goofy grins and bug-eyed stares. He is so kid-friendly that Disney would be wise to lock him up in a multi-picture deal -- as long as they're better pictures than this. Johnson is a fine actor, but he is not capable of elevating a bad screenplay, and this one is a stinker.

The biggest problem is that it just isn't fun. For some reason,

director Andy Fickman (The Game Plan) treats the movie as though it's an action thriller and not a remake of a 1975 film that featured Winkie the winking cat. Fickman's crew shoots nearly everything so close-up that the action is confusing and the exposition is given an artificial tension. Trevor Rabin's score consists entirely of moody, propulsive strings seemingly designed to push a more ominous story forward. Some parents might also find the film's excessive gunplay and talk of dissecting the children to be a little inappropriate for what should be a lighthearted romp.

And to top it off, we don't get the money shot of the RV flying through the air. It certainly isn't necessary, but Flubber made sure to include the basketball scene from The Absent-Minded Professor, so it seems logical that this remake should include the one scene that everyone remembers as well. No such luck -- the RV never takes off, and neither does the movie. <