Kids to the Rescue
Giving a Hoot about the Owls

By Jenny Peters

Carl Hiaasen must feel relieved by Hoot. After all, the best-selling comedic novelist who always makes Florida his setting had one really bad experience in Hollywood—when Demi Moore and her cohorts got a hold of his hilarious Striptease novel and turned it into an abysmal movie. Happily, with this big-screen adaptation of Hoot (Hiaasen’s hugely popular story written for young adults) he’s got a lot to make him smile.

Cast with a trio of good-looking teens, the movie follows the adventures of Roy Eberhardt (Logan Lerman) as he relocates from Montana to Florida. It’s a place he doesn’t want to be, finding himself bullied one minute and in trouble with the law the next. The trouble springs from Roy’s friendship with two kids—pretty Beatrice (Brie Larson) and surfer dude Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley) who are bent on stopping a developer from bulldozing the burrows of a special breed of owls, who dig holes in the ground for their nests.

As the plot thickens – to the sound of new songs from Jimmy Buffett, who also produces and has a small part in the movie – Roy and his friends find a legal way to stop the developer from killing the poor little owls. While it is painfully true that the plot has some holes, they are easy to overlook when sitting in a theater full of mesmerized children. For the 7 to 14 set, Hoot is a real winner, a perfect blend of broad comedy, a little bit of mystery, some peril and a not-so-subtle environmental message.

Parents may find Hoot a bit simplistic and remember other family films from the past that have an underlying message built in, but grown-ups are not the film’s intended audience. So if there are tweener kids in your house, by all means, round them up and head to the multiplex to check out Hoot. They’ll be glad you did.