After taking the rap for nicking a pair of trainers, wrongly convicted felon Stanley Yelnats (LeBoeuf), finds himself in Camp Green Lake, where the punishment takes the form of digging holes in the desert sun.

Along with his fellow inmates Squid, Armpit, ZigZag, Magnet and Zero, they're trucked out every day to a dried up bed lakebed and told to get on with it.

Overseeing their apparently pointless penance is The Warden (Weaver), a draconian vamp with a penchant for nail varnish made up of snake venom (because she's worth it).

She's backed up by Mr Sir (Voight), a mercurial sadist and the ineffectual Dr Pedanski (Blake Nelson).

For a Disney film, this is pretty surreal stuff with the three villains not your cardboard cut-out stereotypes or Stanley's plight the normal straightforward tale of redemption.

A bizarre sub-plot involves a curse placed on his family by a Latvian soothsayer, played by none other than Eartha Kitt, and there's also a bizarre focus on edible raw onions.

In fact, there's so much crammed in that the simple, effective strand of Stanely's story is stretched to breaking point by other narratives trying to gatecrash the party.

However, what starts off as attractively skewed settles into the usual formula for an unconvincingly pat ending.

Tim Evans