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Pop Candy

07/26/00- Updated 09:53 AM ET

 

Pointless plot stalls 'Thomas' in its tracks

By Mike Clark, USA TODAY

Thomas  and the Magic Railroad
Chug-a-chug: Thomas and his buddies get a low grade for 'Magic Railroad.' (Destination Films)

Call it the beauty of the system. One generation gets Peter Fonda as Easy Rider's Wyatt, vrooming out on his Harley to Steppenwolf music. Buzz forward three-plus decades, and kids get him playing an engineer/gramps in Thomas and the Magic Railroad ( out of four), a belated, depressingly dippy spinoff for Thomas the Tank Engine, the breakout star of TV's Shining Time Station.

Hey, it's all transportation, right?

The kind of children's movie that leads to restless "let's go home" whinings from cranky kiddies in the auditorium, this underfueled tot fodder finds Thomas and his friends being threatened by loco(motive) Diesel 10 and a couple of railway flunkies who are trying to force the good-guy engines off the track.

In a role previously played by a post-Beatles Ringo Starr (as well as comedian George Carlin), Alec Baldwin as the Conductor invites a musical cue not of Ticket to Ride but of Help! Adult viewers begging for mental mercy can at least have some fun trying to speculate whether any other actor could look sillier in the Conductor's cap and uniform while sporting a goonish grin. Steven Seagal, maybe.

Dour Fonda, looking as if he invested in the production, spends the entire movie hoping to rejuvenate a train engine named Lady that he mistreated in his younger days. As he tries to score some magical coal that'll do the trick, Mrs. Doubtfire's Mara Wilson is trotted in for name value to play Fonda's granddaughter in what will probably be the final child role of her career. Four years, tops, and she'll be old enough to show up at an American Pie III casting call.

Witless and inert until a chase at the end, the movie probably deserves a footnote for managing to make Pokémon: The Movie 2000 look like the action equivalent of all the Star Wars movies combined, including the ones that haven't been made yet. Even granting the paltry choices moviegoers can expect in August, this one is, by any standard, a choo-choo boo-boo. (Opens nationwide today; G)




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