MOVIE REVIEW : There’s Little That’s Magical in ‘The Wizard’

Video games, and the kids obsessed with them, are the main subjects of “The Wizard” (citywide). But is it inevitable that the movie itself become a video game, with the movie-makers ramming us through the story, trying to jam down all our buttons?

“Rain Man” may be one of the models for “The Wizard,” but the treatment is closer to “Pac-man.” The characters don’t really interact. They keep moving forward, gobbling up the plot as they go. By the time they’ve moved from the Nevada deserts to the gaudy glamour centers of Los Angeles, for a championship called Video Armageddon, the story has been chewed to pieces.

“The Wizard” is bright, fast and energetic, but there’s not much real life to it. It’s another movie that’s disappeared into its own marketing hook: Three kids on the road, living and loving, racing toward personal redemption and video ascension.

In the movie, brothers Corey (Fred Savage) and Jimmy (Luke Edwards) flee from their desert homes to save the socially-alienated Jimmy from an institution. Though they’re brothers, they live apart: Corey with his rowdy blue-collar dad Sam (Beau Bridges) and brother Nick (Christian Slater); Jimmy his with his prim mother (Wendy Phillips) and prickly stepfather (Sam McMurray) in an uptight yuppie environment that’s driving him buggy.

Soon, there’s a set of criss-crossing, cross-class pursuits. Dad and brother are after them in a pickup truck; Mom and Step-dad have hired a Blue Meanie of a Bounty Hunter (Will Seltzer), who practically cackles with villainy, while engaging in a set of Laurel-and-Hardy car-destruction duels with Sam and Nick.

Improbably, the kids run into their main game competitor at a truckstop: video genius Lucas (Jackey Vinson), with his power glove and “spaghetti western” intro. Filling out the road team--playing Dorothy Lamour to their Bob and Bing--is the feisty Haley (Jenny Lewis), whose kissing lesson for the swaggering Corey provides one of the film’s few highlights.

Producer-writer David Chisholm knows all the road movie archetypes. Rock music pumps up the backgrounds, the children are rescued by truckers and bikers. But perhaps he knows them too well. “The Wizard” not only recalls the basic situation of “Rain Man.” It also recalls “Midnight Run,” “Twins” “Things Change,” “Hollywood or Bust”--all those other “on the road” movies where a glib smoothie (like Savage) and an awkward or shy natural genius (Edwards) flee through the desert, pursued by authority figures or crooks and heading toward gambling cities and jackpots.

There’s not a speck of originality or a squib of spontaneity in this kiddie-kiddie “buddy-buddy” movie. Director Todd Holland, making his feature debut, is a recent UCLA Film School graduate; Chisholm is active on TV. They both show a certain superficial verve, but the script is too frail for a movie, too dense for a video game. And most of the actors are too good for this picture.

At the end, “The Wizard” (MPAA rated PG) virtually becomes a trailer-advertisement for Universal Studios--with everybody racing wildly though the studio’s amusement park trying to find Video Armageddon. There may be some symbolic significance in that, but it’s probably not wise to dwell on it.