"Race to Witch Mountain": Close encounters of the robotic kind

The new Disney film "Race to Witch Mountain" is, I'm told, not a remake of the 1975 Disney film "Escape to Witch Mountain," but rather a high-tech re-imagining of the book "Escape to Witch Mountain," by Alexander Key. It's a theme-park ride of a movie, filled with whooshings down tunnels, screechy car trips in the desert, extraterrestrial beings and a requisite person who keeps talking about "science fact." Given enough popcorn, kids should find it diverting; adults may be less than enthralled.

All this whooshing around tries vainly to offset the movie's central problem: Nobody here has a personality. Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock), a character who didn't exist in the earlier movie, is a cabbie and an ex-con trying to make a living in Las Vegas. On a busy day on which some sort of alien-life convention is under way at Planet Hollywood, two mysterious blond teenagers appear in his cab. They are siblings Sara (AnnaSophia Robb, a ringer for the "Freaky Friday" vintage Lindsay Lohan) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig), and they are from another planet. We know this because they talk in monotone without contractions, and because they don't have iPods.

Though Johnson is making strides as an actor, he's still a fairly laconic presence, so much of the movie is three people speaking robotically (never a good idea, even when William Hurt and Kevin Costner do it) and racing about to save the kids from government experimentation and get them back to their spaceship. This is not as thrilling as it might be, even when scientist Dr. Alex Friedman (Carla Gugino) and a cute Disney-movie dog are tossed in. Garry Marshall, as an eccentric UFO specialist, brings a bit of a spark, as does a grumbling Cheech Marin as a perplexed auto mechanic.

As with many PG movies, you wonder exactly what age group this is aimed at: Young grade-schoolers may be frightened by all the guns, head-bashing (hey, it's what The Rock does), darkness and peril; older kids may scorn the Disney-fication of it all. But those fond of the original may enjoy spotting a few homages (the actors who played the original kids, Kim Richards and Iake Eissinmann, appear here as a waitress and a sheriff), and as kid fare goes "Race to Witch Mountain" is fairly innocuous.

But all those weird monotones start to get to you after a while, leading to elaborate alternative scenarios. Did these performances all come from a computer somewhere, maybe deep in some Hollywood version of Witch Mountain, where evil executives are manipulating the voices of children and former pro wrestlers? Now that might have been a more interesting movie.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com