June 28, 1999
Web posted at: 12:37 p.m. EDT (1637 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- "Desert Blue" -- one of those self-consciously "quirky" comedies that repeatedly pats itself on the back for being about nothing at all -- is the lackluster new film from writer-director Morgan J. Freeman.

Freeman inexplicably won the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival a couple years back, for another low-budget slice of teen-driven monotony called "Hurricane Streets." "Desert Blue," exhibiting a newly developed veneer of directorial competence, is a huge improvement, but that's not saying much. Anything less interesting than the first film, and they'd have put it to sleep.

"Quirky" is one of the American entertainment industry's most frequently utilized sell-words, situated in popularity right between the nearly all-encompassing "edgy" and the Howard Stern-inspired "in your face." Such simple terms, used to signify that "hip" is in the house, are a staple of independent filmmaking.

And Freeman, a downright lousy screenwriter, is giving over-simplification a full workout this time around. The plot of "Desert Blue" evidently is supposed to elicit robust rounds of laughter because it sits in neutral while the audience prays (ultimately in vain) for it to start moving. Any forward gear would suffice.

The virtually inert proceedings are set in a no-horse desert town called Baxter, California, population 89. Baxter consists of a burned-down motel, a diner and two "tourist attractions" -- a never-completed water-slide park with no water, and a huge metal ice cream cone that stands at the side of the highway, a totem of tacky Americana.

The kids in Baxter have absolutely nothing of interest to say, and they get together often to say it. They're not funny. They're not complex. They spend a great deal of their time scowling and blowing things up with M-80's. They're basically bored to death, and, as any movie fan knows, a bored teen-ager is the direct result of life in small-town America. (Then again, the kids in "Hurricane Streets" were just as broodingly somnambulant, and they lived in New York City.)

Brendan Sexton III (an actor who also lent his dull-eyed slack to "Hurricane Streets") plays Blue Baxter. Skinny and inclined to shrugging, he's obsessed with opening the abandoned water park. The park was designed by Blue's dear departed father, and the pipe dream of bringing the attraction to life serves the purpose of giving Sexton something to do with his hands while he delivers pedestrian dialogue.

Blue's friends are Pete (Casey Affleck), a troublemaker who races all-terrain vehicles; a bomb-making girl named Ely (Christina Ricci, pouting through the eyeliner once again); and Sandy (Sara Gilbert), a young woman who works the ice cream machine over by that big metal cone. Manning the perimeter is Cale, a beer-guzzling fat kid of no real concern played by Ethan Suplee.

One day, a young TV actress from Los Angeles arrives. She's played by Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn's daughter and the most talented performer among these teens. She stops by to see the cone with her dad, a college professor played by John Heard. Dad teaches courses about roadside Americana, and he's thrilled with the big, rusty cone ... a point that doesn't seem likely to get him tenure at any of our finer universities.

Eventually, a tanker truck turns over, covering the highway with the foaming secret ingredient of a popular cola that's manufactured on the outskirts of town. (There's a huge factory looming, but God only knows where the people who run it are.) Before you can say "contrived beyond belief," the FBI moves in and quarantines the town because the driver of the truck died after getting a face full of the foam.

This gives Blue the opportunity to open up his gooey little heart to the much more worldly TV actress, whose name, it turns out, is Skye. Blue-Skye -- get it? Then the kids mope around some more, only now with a celebrity in their midst. They blow up more stuff, or splatter tossed oranges with a baseball bat when they're in a bind. Vague fears that the government is covering up something more sinister than spilled soda pop replace what would normally be referred to as content.

All the big directors have their topic, the one idea they like to obsess over in every other film. Martin Scorsese investigates the lingering effects of Catholicism on fallen Christians, Steven Spielberg looks into long-suppressed memories of early childhood, etc. Freeman seems most interested in getting to the bottom of boredom, and it's taken him only two tries to get there. The ultimate truth is that boredom is extremely boring.

"Desert Blue" contains bad language, talk of sex, drug use, drinking and teens breaking things. And nothing else. Rated R. 90 minutes.