LIFE IS ALL BAD IN 'CHUMSCRUBBER'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

KIDS DO DELINQUENT things while their parents act like children in ``The Chumscrubber.''

It's a visually impressive but emotionally tin-eared trawl over that oft-scraped indie film territory, the soulless suburban landscape. As usual, the younger set is presented as more authentic than their self-absorbed, medication-, materialism- and therapy-addled elders. Of course, the teens are just as drug-dependent, avaricious and deluded about the paths they believe will lead them to happiness. But they're too young to have fully grown into their hypocrisy. And they're, you know, better-looking, so they must be more sympathetic.

Filmed in Stevenson Ranch, the movie's everywhere/nowhere development, called Hillside, is character-overpopulated. But few of these folks come off as more than collections of distasteful traits.

The main story revolves around Dean Stiffle, the latest in that cute English boy Jamie Bell's (``Billy Elliot'') dispiriting recent run of glum, unconvincing American adolescents.

Dean discovers his best friend has committed suicide but doesn't find it necessary to interrupt the pool party the boy's parents are hosting with the downer information. This leads to questions about Dean's own stability, especially from his pop-psychiatrist father (William Fichtner), whose self-help book empire is threatened by Dean's pathological indifference.

Dean also has a mom (Allison Janney) who is all but addicted to her vitamin supplement business, and a hateful little brother, Charlie (Rory Culkin). Believing that Dean has access to the deceased's dope stash, some of the dead boy's high-school drug cronies plot to kidnap Charlie but snatch the wrong kid instead. He turns out to be the son of an obnoxious divorcee (Rita Wilson) who's so focused on her upcoming remarriage to the town's increasingly spacy mayor (Ralph Fiennes) that she doesn't notice her child is missing.

That wedding is planned for the same time that the suicide's grieving mother (Glenn Close) has scheduled her son's memorial, thus dividing the cul-de-sac neighbors over which event to attend (this is as close to a moral crisis as any of the adults are permitted). Will Dean care enough about the kidnapped boy to rescue him before both ceremonies are ruined? Will we care enough to stick out all the arch bellyaching to its inevitably messy conclusion?

In case you're wondering what chum scrubbing has to do with the film, the title character is a headless, berserk monster from violent video games and cartoon shows that all the kids in Hillside seem to dig. To first-time feature director Arie Posin and his writing partner, Zac Stanford, Chummy represents teenage rage or apocalyptic cleansing or something. The belligerent creature might seem more heroic if, say, he went around scrubbing ungrateful, whiny, privileged youths' mouths out with soap.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

THE CHUMSCRUBBER - Two stars

(R: violence, drug use, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle, Justin Chatwin, Glenn Close, Rory Culkin, William Fichtner, Ralph Fiennes, Allison Janney, Carrie-Anne Moss, Lou Taylor Pucci, Rita Wilson.

Director: Arie Posin.

Running time: 1 hr. 48 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Laemmle One Colorado 8, Pasadena; Sherman Oaks 5, Sherman Oaks; Edwards Park Place 10, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Suburbia is a spiritual wasteland - again - in this often cartoonish depiction of self-absorbed parents not noticing that their confused kids are getting into a lot of trouble.