The Adventure Club

Had high hopes for this movie. My kids (9 & 11) are the perfect age for this kind of gentle adventure film. The film is a loose re-hash of The Goonies storyline. Boy finds artefact of his relic hunting grandfather and sees it as an opportunity to save his mother's science museum along with his adventure club friends - I am sure Spielberg would be gearing his lawyers up were it not for the fact that this film is so awful. I can handle a bit of bad acting from child actors but when the whole cast is terrible then that makes swallowing a plot that has more holes than a cheese grater that much more challenging. There were multiple moments throughout the film when my kids were shouting, 'oh, come on!' at the need for the audience to suspend disbelief to such a massive extent. The film is littered with lazy film making, stereotypes, dull exposition and an appalling lack of cinéma vérité. The film is well shot. That is just about everything I can say as a positive. Avoid.

Ricky Young, Bill, and Sandy Leeman are kids who call themselves the Adventure Club. They build a time machine which doesn't work as all of their other adventures. Ricky finds a building blueprint from his late grandpa and a real adventure begins. It's a small Canadian movie for kids. It has a nice sweet charm but it has no oomph. It's National Treasure Junior. It's a car that gets in second gear but goes no further. The second half has a wishing box which doesn't do much. I'd rather do more with that and forget the science center being in trouble. This is the kids' story, and not about the adults. When it brings in a wishing box, you have to get some bad wishes. That's the point of it.

A really good example of lazy scriptwriting and actors who are only there for the paycheck. Unfortunately my 10yo daughters chose this for our Friday night family viewing, and I knew we were in trouble listening to the main kid characters opening moronic dialogue in their clubroom. Even Billy Zane disappoints as the bad guy, with the only interesting performance coming from the underutilized shop owner Ozzie. Keep scrolling through Netflix and give this one a wide berth.