Old-school sometimes is good-school

When I was a kid, the show I couldn’t wait for each week was “Disneyland” (later known as “The Wonderful World of Disney”). It made Sunday night almost bearable, even though Monday morning I had to return to school.

It wasn’t just that we got to see live-action shows that featured such historical characters – drawn oh-so broadly – as Davy Crockett, Texas John Slaughter and Elfego Baca but that we saw lots of animated features, live-action adaptations of novels (“Treasure Island”) and nature films (“The Vanishing Prairie”).

“Disneyland” and such old-school entertainment came to mind as I sat through “Race to Witch Mountain.” Based on the same Alexander Key novel that led to the 1975 film “Escape to Witch Mountain,” this new film owes more to classic Disney than almost anything else Uncle Walt’s studio has put on the big screen over the past several years.

It stars Dwayne Johnson, the former professional wrestling star who has dropped his former nickname, “The Rock,” in his quest to become a legitimate movie star. And as he has shown in such films as “The Rundown,” “Be Cool” and “The Game Plan,” it’s working: Johnson no longer has to hide behind his WWF image.

Johnson plays Jack Bruno, a former convict/NASCAR wannabe who has been reduced to driving a taxi in Las Vegas. One day, after escaping a pair of heavies who work for his former mob-connected boss, he encounters a pair of preteens, Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig) who pretty quickly prove to be as mysterious and they are needful of Jack’s help.

Seems the two are from a distant planet, and their society is dying because their planet is – victimized, it seems, by the same kind of ecological carelessness that humans are famous for. The kids have come to prove that their own world can be saved, information that they hope will stave off their military’s intention of invading Earth.

But first they have to, one, recover the proof (in something that looks like a combination Gameboy and MP3 player); two, find the saucer they crashed in the Nevada desert; and, three, return home.

To do so, they have to dodge an assassin that has been sent to stop them, keep out of the clutches of a creepy U.S. official (Ciarﾇn Hinds) and all the forces that he’s able to bring to bear. Helping out is a rogue astrophysicist (Carla Gugino) and a gang of geeks straight out of “X-Files” territory.

The film’s special effects are hardly state-of-the-art. In fact, the film looks at times as if it has barely a $20 million production budget – with $19.5 million of that going for Johnson’s salary.

But the kids are cute, Gugino is eye candy, Hinds is appropriately dark and Johnson adds the spark of a born comic.

“Race to Witch Mountain” may be to “WALL-E” what Fritos are to foie gras. But it would have held up well in, say, 1957.

Sometimes intentional retro truly is worth the effort.

Below: Carla Gugino and Dwayne Johnson star in “Race to Witch Mountain.”

Associated Press photo