Parents' Guide to Operation Dalmatian: The Big Adventure

The humor here will appeal perfectly to 5-year-olds, but their parents may have trouble ignoring the terrible acting and the corny jokes. This is not to say that the piece, written and directed by Michael Paul Girard, is entirely devoid of cleverness. The script does display an understanding of irony and comic juxtaposition, but it lacks wit, which shows best in the context of a meticulous plot structuring, something that could use a little work. Still, Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and FDR all are quoted, and that gets points.

The filmmakers try to play bias for laughs as they present a caricature of a whooping and chanting Native American medicine man, in full face paint, who happens to have graduated with a chemical engineering degree from Harvard. A wacky but warm professor, the medicine man's Crimson classmate, is central-casting-eccentric, and this is what makes the movie 5-year-old-friendly while a bit of a yawn, however sweet, for anyone else. There is plenty of highfalutin' comic vocabulary and ideas -- follicles, photovoltaic charges, molecular configurations, and polarities that extricate unwanted pigment. Parents could have fun watching this with a young child.