Holesome family entertainment

Stanley's dad is an inventor determined to eradicate foot odour. Life at home is smelly and loving, but it all turns to chaos one day when the teenaged Stan (Shia LaBoeuf) is wrongly arrested for theft.

He is dispatched to a camp for delinquent boys in the Texan desert, a grim place where the young inmates must dig holes all day, overseen by a crazed Sigourney Weaver and Jon Voight in a wig. They are not told what they're digging for. Treasure? Oil? It hasn't rained for 100 years and the ground is tough as Perspex.

Holes, based on the best-selling novel by Louis Sachar, is a terrific film, both casual and weird. At Camp Green Lake, the boys sleep in tents like archaeologists, dressed in Guantanamo Bay orange boiler suits and bandannas straight from Apocalypse Now.

They banter and barter, and recall life before The Fall. One lad, Zero (Khleo Thomas), is a particularly sad case. Abandoned by his mother, he slept rough in Central Park until he was picked up for vagrancy and packed off to the camp. Soon, he and Stan become as thick as thieves, curious as hell about what they are digging for and full of plans for a daring escape.

At one point, they are out in the desert together, looking for water, staggering along, talking all the time. You can even hear them under the soundtrack (some great Blues, some Country and Western, lots of growling about broken hearts) going on and on in a very natural register, like two brothers on a bad holiday buoying each other up.

It is rare to see child actors being this sensible about the camera, and making it all look so easy - particularly in a Disney family film such as this. It makes for chunks of utter contentment.

LaBoeuf has the face of a kid from an early Steven Spielberg movie, a good, naughty boy with soppy curls and a sharp tongue. Sometimes, when he is lounging about in his hole with his crumpled baseball cap and uneven tan, he is like something from M.A.S.H., one of those sarky medics skiving off from all the horror to eat olives and talk about bras.

Watch out for Weaver in a pair of jeans - one of those styles that does up somewhere under the armpits, making her already long legs seem freakish. She looks like she might stride across this desert, taking pride in every move of her magnificent frame, a frame as astonishing as the Texan scenery.

She is a baddie here, but there are moments where she drops her guard and we see the face of the proud girl in The Year of Living Dangerously; her mouth concentrated, set small in a wide jaw, all the drama held very tight. It is a heroic face, and one completely at home in this Boys' Own adventure.

Holes
Cert: PG