F

One of the first things you see in “Catch That Kid,” in a scene set at a go-cart track, is a large sign reading “Pit Zone Entrance.” Take that as a warning, because the movie is the pits.

It’s an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of such live-action children’s adventure flicks as the “Spy Kids” franchise and “Agent Cody Banks,” but with a gender switch. The central character here is a girl, Maddy (Kristen Stewart); she’s the daughter of Tom (Sam Robards), an erstwhile mountain climber who now operates the go-cart track. She idolizes him, and emulates his past adventures by climbing walls and what look like water towers despite the misgivings of her mother (Jennifer Beals), a bank security expert. She also has two buddies, techno-geek Austin (Corbin Bleu) and Gus (Max Thieriot), a normal tyke whose nasty older brother Brad (Stark Sands) is a security guard trainee at the bank where Matty’s mother is setting up a sophisticated alarm system. Both Austin and Gus have prepubescent crushes on Maddy.

The plot kicks in when Tom suddenly falls ill with a paralyzing injury from a fall he once suffered and his only hope for recovery is an expensive experimental operation in Denmark. (This odd geographic point apparently results from the fact that the script by Derek Brandt and Derek Haas–authors of that earlier masterpiece of subtlety “2 Fast 2 Furious”–is adapted from a Danish movie.) To get the money, she enlists Austin and Gus in a plot to break into the bank where her mother works and steal the quarter of a million dollars needed for the operation.

Perhaps the European version of this story had some charm, but if so it’s completely dissipated in the trans-Atlantic crossing. This is one of the dullest, as well as silliest and most irresponsible pictures of its kind ever made. The three kids lack the personality to hold one’s attention, and the adults who surround them are utterly pallid, with the exception of James Le Gros as a martinet security guard. He’s so comically terrible that this represents a career low for the actor–quite something when one considers that he has appeared in such pieces of rubbish as “Phantasm 2” and “Solarbabies.” (Sands, an amiable yellow fellow who would be a promising find in the right roles, is forced to mug and stumble ferociously just to keep up.) The elaborate heist sequence that takes up a good deal of the plot lacks the slightest degree of cleverness or even intelligibility, since every twist in it seems to happen by the merest chance. It also involves bits of business–like the kids being threatened by rottweilers and careening through the streets on superpowered go-carts–that cross the line insofar as safety is concerned. And the whole notion that Maddy should be rewarded for criminal activity is morally reprehensible, however noble her motives.

“Catch That Kid” is directed without style or energy by Bart Freundlich, whose previous films (“The Myth of Fingerprints” and “World Traveler”) were heavy-handed clunkers for more mature audiences. It may now be said that he’s flunked out with both pre-teen and post-teen viewers. Technically the picture is thoroughly mediocre; one element that stands out, though for all the wrong reasons, is the really irritating score by George S. Clinton, which loudly tries to pump up the limp action to no avail.

This is actually worse than most live-action Saturday morning kids’ fare. Even by the appallingly low standards of the genre, “Catch That Kid” is dismal; by the end you’ll surely agree with Gus, who remarks at one point, “This whole bank idea sucks.”