C

The fact that it wasn’t pre-screened for critics might make you expect the worst of this kidflick, but “Aliens in the Attic” isn’t all that bad. In fact, if it were being shown on one of the family cable networks, it would be something adolescent boys in particular would enjoy. It’s out of place on the big screen, though, except for the most undemanding audiences.

The title pretty much says it all. The Pearson family—Stuart (Kevin Nealon), Nina (Gillian Vigman), their children Bethany (Ashley Tisdale), Tom (Carter Jenkins) and Hannah (Ashley Boettcher)—along with Stuart’s brother Nathan (Andy Richter) and his sons Jake (Austin Butler) and twins Art and Lee (Henri and Regan Young) and the kids’ grandma (Doris Roberts)—are vacationing at a Michigan lake house. (Curious geographic note: they’re shown leaving Chicago and arriving at their destination after a brief road trip, which suggests the makers didn’t look very closely at a map.) The place is invaded by four little creatures from the planet Zircon with a mission to recover a device buried under the house that will initiate an invasion of earth. And since the critters have a lobotomizing gun that can turn adults into helpless automatons—a fate that befalls not only granny but Ricky (Robert Hoffman), Bethany’s smarmy college boyfriend—it’s up to the kids to defeat them and save not only their family but the world.

I suspect it will come as no surprise that they do.

Much of the picture is devoted to slapstick battles between the CGI creatures (voiced by Thomas Haden Church, Josh Peck, Ashley Peldon and Kari Wahlgren) and the children, but time’s taken out for some heart-to-hearts between Tom, a smart kid who’s tanking his classes in order not to be thought a nerd (the experience with the aliens makes himself understand the value of knowledge, of course), and his dad, and even more violent action involving Ricky, who’s turned into a sort of crazy elastic man under alien control, and grandma (a big martial-arts fight between the two after the kids get granny’s control device is supposed to be the piece de resistance, but is taken too far). The big twist—though it’s hardly a surprise—is that one of the scouting party turns out to be nice and becomes the kids’ ally. And at the end there’s a “Power Rangers” moment when two of the critters grow to gigantic size and face off against each other.

The effects in “Aliens in the Attic” look pretty ordinary in this day and age, but they’d certainly pass muster on the small screen. It’s unfortunate that the “good” alien so closely resembles E.T. (adding an extra pair of arms isn’t really much of a disguise), and that his final goodbye is so closely modeled on Spielberg’s film (John Debney’s music even recalls John Williams’ at that point). But the youngsters are an appealing bunch, though Boettcher should have been reined in by director John Schultz a bit—her mugging is right out of a bad sitcom—and Tisdale comes off rather shrill. The adults are another matter. Nealon, as usual, italicizes every line, Richter’s doofus routine gets old fast, and Tim Meadows’ turn as the local sheriff is so laid-back it might have been phoned in. Roberts, looking very frail, doesn’t have the comic timing she once did (and should have been spared a gag about her dentures), while Hoffman—or his CGI double—chews the scenery, which is what he’s expected to do, and kids will love his “stuntwork.”

There’s some of the same sort of simple highjinks here found in such earlier kidflicks like “Sky High” and “How to Eat Fried Worms,” and the picture doesn’t descend to the level of stuff like the “Spy Kids” movies. But it lacks magic, and except as a harmless diversion for the youngsters in a rainy afternoon, you can safely hold off until it shows up on DVD.

C

There’s a good deal to be said for understatement in a movie, especially one that deals with matters that can easily become overheated. But ironically “The Lucky Ones” takes reticence to excess. It concerns injured soldiers coming back from Iraq, a subject that was treated rather hyperbolically by Kimberly Peirce in the recent “Stop-Loss.” Here, though, the style adopted by Neil Burger {“The Illusionist”) is so laid-back and plain that the film leaves almost no impression at all.

The picture follows three GIs returning after the tours. Cheaver (Tim Robbins) is a reservist, injured in an accident (involving a portable toilet, ha-ha), who’s glad to be free of the service and, after two years’ absence, anxious to reunite with his wife and son in suburban St. Louis. Colce (Rachel McAdams) is southern girl, recovering from a leg wound, who plans to spend her thirty-day leave in Las Vegas visiting the parents of her boyfriend who was killed in Iraq, and returning his valuable guitar to them. And TK (Michael Pena) is an ambitious, rigid young man planning to get some unorthodox treatment in the same city for a shrapnel injury that’s left him unable to perform sexually before continuing on to California, where his fiancee lives. Unfortunately, when they arrive in New York from Germany, they find air traffic snarled as the result of a blackout and decide to pool their resources, rent a car and drive together to Missouri, where they’ll go their separate ways.

Of course, things don’t turn out quite as planned. Cheaver’s homecoming goes badly, and he suddenly finds himself homeless, unlikely to get his old job back, and in need of a wad of cash. He decides to continue westward with the other two, prolonging the picaresque road trip that’s already featured that old standby, a barroom brawl instigated in this case when some snotty college girls ridicule Colce’s limp. Their further adventures will include being locked out of their car, getting into a harrowing accident at a rural stop sign, visiting a church whose pastor prays over the men at Colce’s behest, and—most implausibly of all—not only attending a wealthy parishioner’s birthday party, where Cheaver has a comic sexual romp, but also encountering a tornado that has a therapeutic effect on TK’s condition.

Actually, this makes the picture sound far more energetic than it actually is, because despite all the incident it’s flatly written and played rather lackadaisically. Burger seems to be going for a dryly naturalistic style in which even outrageous moments—like that farcical sex scene Cheaver has on a lark—aren’t given much shape or panache and the more dramatic (or melodramatic) ones are tamped down as well. The result is a strangely undernourished mixture of the serious and the quirky, which unsuccessfully tries to merge a sympathetic picture of soldiers trying to reconnect with civilian life with a comic road trip.

The performances are similarly drained of vitality. Robbins—whom one might think a strange choice to star in a picture that ultimately seems to say little beyond “support the troops” anyway—mostly looks lethargic and vaguely disinterested, while McAdams’ lower-class spunkiness too often comes across as calculated. Pena’s character actually develops more than the others, and he catches the changes fairly subtly, though the turn in the last act is overly cute. This is basically a three-person piece, which is probably a good thing given that the rest of the cast are rather amateurish (or perhaps just indifferently directed)—though John Heard does show up for what amounts to a cameo in which he manages to chew the scenery for sixty seconds or so.

Undistinguished technically as well as narratively, “The Lucky Ones” is probably a sincere effort on Burger’s part to say something insightful about the soldiers coming back damaged from Iraq. But it represents a steep decline from the moodily effective “Illusionist” (and even from his earlier picture, “Interview with the Assassin”). Given the result, the title certainly doesn’t refer to the audience.