“Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” is sure to appeal to kids of all ages from 6 to 9 who are female and have no taste or sense of humor. Tomorrow’s Chico’s shoppers have to come from somewhere, I suppose.
The film centers on the paradox of Kid Summer — you can’t wait for it to begin, you are bored when it does. Yet those who dare to make films about boredom should beware of succeeding too well.
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Third-grader Judy (Jordana Beatty, an Australian actress with pleasingly uncontrollable red hair) is a grumpy suburban kid who chafes as her best friends go off to learn to be lion tamers at circus camp or swim with sharks in Borneo. Like Judy, we are stuck doing nothing much — um, why can’t we be watching a movie about cool stuff like that?
Instead, so starved is Judy for ideas that, as she might put it, AN HOUR INTO THE MOVIE her Aunt Opal (Heather Graham) says maybe they should both Google “fun.” Kid cinema isn’t like “Old Yeller” anymore, is it? And yet — it’s so much sadder. I didn’t even know kids were still capable of being bored. I was, but I didn’t have the Internet, 500 cable channels or texting.
In that first hour, the movie has no plot, just a lot of teeth grinding and epic-fail slapstick as Judy builds a chart and fills it up with a to-do list of activities she believes would be thrilling but never are — for her or us. An effort to surf is curtailed by a jellyfish attack. She tries to walk a tightrope 4 feet over a stream, then falls in. She and her little brother, Stink Moody (which would have been a far more accurate title for the movie), open their mouths while chewing peas. While decorating garbage-can lids with her Aunt Opal, a groovy Peace Corps-and-yoga type, Judy gets her hand stuck on her art project.
Idly I began to wonder whether my 9-year-old self had it right on this subject, as on so many others: Maybe girls are simply far more boring than boys? The boy-centric “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” looks like “Lawrence of Arabia” in comparison to the squinched vision and lack of imagination here.
And the only good ideas on offer are those of Stink (Parris Mosteller). He’s on a quest to find Bigfoot. Meanwhile, his sister and the aunt want to . . . go to the library so they can place the garbage-can lids on statues of lions. Or try on bracelets and mood rings. In a few years, the lad is going to be ready to be a character in “Red Dawn.” His sister — maybe “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”
A trip to a creepy abandoned amusement park threatens to at least make things a bit “Scooby-Doo” — but nothing happens, except the kids notice there are smears of poop on their sandwiches. They put them down, scream and leave. Eventually even Judy realizes her small brother has better ideas than she does, so she abandons being lame and acts more like him.
The two of them spend the last 20 minutes trying to find Bigfoot in the neighborhood, and at one point think they see the brute climbing into an ice-cream truck. This would have been a perfect time for a cameo by that human Sasquatch Robin Williams, or at least a rip-off of “Harry and the Hendersons,” but the movie’s budget doesn’t allow for either of these things, and disappointment reigns again. The mystery is why the filmmakers thought third-graders or anyone else would be willing to pay for this master class in tedium.