More about this DVD  •  DVD Info  •  Movie Main Page  •  Message Board

It's almost Dostoyevskian - young Stanley Yelnats (catch the reversal?) walks down the street one day and a pair of a celebrity's tennis shoes falls on him out of the sky. The cops think he stole them (talk about that whole wrong-place-wrong-time thing) and he's sent to what functions as a juvenile detention center in the middle of a foreboding desert. There, he is to spend his days digging holes and looking for buried treasure for a behemoth of a guard played by Jon Voight, and the lusty warden (Sigourney Weaver - yum).

And as Stanley serves this prison time, he learns of the strange and abyssal universe around him - this hole-digging scheme is obviously more than what it seems on the surface - and picks up a striking camaraderie with his rag-tag bunch of compatriots also serving time.

I'm not sure if the book the movie is based upon is a full-tilt classic. Kids seem to adore it, but I actually felt it faltered almost as much as it succeeded. Yet there is a spirit both to Sachar's novel and director Andrew Davis' adaptation that excuses many of the original manuscript's shortcomings. Thankfully, the film mirrors the book's flashback-within-a-flashback structure, which makes for a fast-paced and blink-or-you'll-miss-it barrage of information, even if the editing style can be a bit overcooked and hard to follow (this film version relies on staggered slow motion a lot, and it gets a little annoying after a while).

But, as with most children's novels turned possible franchises, the true success of Holes as a movie is how it makes the book's characters literally come alive on screen. Shia LaBeouf - currently riding high off of the Project Greenlight movie, The Battle of Shaker Heights - is a great example of that: he's able to make Stanley not just another disoriented kid but legitimately infuses him with a wonderful sense of empowerment. And once he and fellow camp-mate Zero become the best of friends, there's a quiet subtlety that permeates their relationship. It's really very sweet and genuinely touching.

And Weaver, Voight, and fellow big-timers like Patricia Arquette and Tim Blake Nelson take their relatively small roles and funnel them into wonderful if sometimes quite campy caricatures that will appeal to both the kids who have read the book a hundred times and the parents who get suckered into watching it. Arquette is especially fascinating - as the woman in the 1800s whose interracial romance and her society's subsequent rebuttal of it turns her into a hated and feared vigilante, she's both empathetic and sassy as hell.

At the end of the day, I still can't really say whether Holes is a great film. Davis, who also helmed The Fugitive and Chain Reaction, isn't quite able to infuse the film with any true uniqueness, but it is a fun two hours nonetheless. Great performances, some inspired uses of music (for once the pop song soundtrack isn't grating), and warts and all, it tells an interesting story. It doesn't soar the way Harry Potter does, but then again, what does? Right, 10- year-olds?

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Presented here in a THX certified, 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, Holes looks most excellent. The print is pristine, color reproduction nicely-defined and blacks consistent and strong. For once, fleshtones and the more subdued browns and yellows of the desert are as vivid and striking as the supersaturated reds and greens - this transfer somehow accentuates both the intense and the subtle shades across the spectrum. Detail is often very nice and three-dimensional, with excellent shadow delineation and no apparent compression artifacts. An excellent transfer.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, Holes sounds great, too. Dialogue is reproduced with great clarity and frequency response is generally excellent. Highs and lows sound expansive and rich, and imaging across all channels is above average. Alas, sometimes the music and pop songs are balanced too loud in the mix across the front soundstage. However, surrounds are given a great workout, with better balance with the score and excellent ambient effects. The .1 LFE is also forceful and crisp and clear. Quite good.

Also included are French and Spanish Dolby 5.1 dubs, plus English captions encoded as subtitles, Spanish subtitles, and true English Closed Captions.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

We get not one but two screen-specific audio commentaries: one with cast members Shia LaBeouf, Khleo Thomas, Jake M. Smith and Max Kasch and the other with director Andrew Davis and novelist and screenwriter Louis Sachar. The cast track is all but completely incomprehensible - the boys sound like they're having a great time in the studio, but their incessant yelling and contrast tomfoolery makes you want to call over a yard duty every once in a while. Davis and Sachar's commentary is more involving: They don't knock it out of the park, but their thoughts on the cultural importance of the film and why they wanted to be a part of it makes this an interesting one to check out and far preferable to the screeching kids' track.

We also have two nice featurettes: First up is the 10-minute The Boys of D-Tent that takes a peek behind the casting process and is quite entertaining, followed by a 9-minute look at the writing of the book and its eventual translation to film, Digging the First Hole. Both are better than average.

Six deleted scenes are next: While some are interesting for fans of the novel (many of them are lifted straight from the book), it's pretty clear why they were all excised. The second nixed scene here, though - "The Second Hole Is The Hardest" - is well worth watching as it really proves what a fine actor Shia LaBeouf is becoming.

We also get a cute but incidental gag reel, and a ridiculous 1-minute music video for "Dig It" performed by the boys in the cast. There's also a THX optimizer in the set-up menu.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

The custom interface offers some weblinks and an opportunity, in true Disney DVD style, to register your DVD.

Parting Thoughts