Nicknames also figure prominently in Louis Sachar's Newbery Medal-winning Holes, the best children's book of the past 10 years. There's Armpit, Zigzag, X-Ray, Radar, Zero and Caveman -- cool names with cool reasons behind them. Hoot is a darn fine children's book, too. It was a Newbery honoree in 2003 and should have made a darn good movie.

It certainly means well. When a greedy restaurant chain targets a vacant lot where burrowing owls are living for its next pancake house, the kids stand up for the endangered critters by sabotaging the construction site. But Hiaasen's sense of humor loses something in the translation. What's side-splitting on the page becomes silly on the screen.

Take David Delinko (Luke Wilson), the slow-witted police officer who unwittingly becomes the kids' best ally. He's the kind of cop that would make Hazzard County proud, as evidenced by the Police Academy-lame low-speed chase between Roy (on bicycle) and Delinko (in his squad car). Once a promising leading man, this role finds Wilson operating squarely in David Arquette territory, from which there is no going back.

As a character named Curly, Tim Blake Nelson may as well be channeling the Three Stooges buffoon of the same name. With a weakness for slapstick, writer/director Wil Shriner tries to follow the book, but gets the tone wrong in several crucial scenes (most embarrassing: the movie's best-friends montage would feel right at home in Brokeback Mountain).

The kid who plays Roy (Logan Lerman, the ''Bobby'' of Jack & Bobby) does a fine job, but the only characters whom it's really possible to sympathize with are the owls, seen only in fleeting glimpses. Considering the fond following the shy birds have among Floridians, it's astonishing that the kids in the movie must resort to borderline-criminal extremes to mobilize the community in the owls' defense. A filmmaker like John Sayles (Sunshine State) who shares Hiaasen's issue-conscious outlook might have framed the lesson a bit more eloquently. But Shriner blows it.

Rather than advocating sensible activism the way the book does, (warning: spoilers ahead) he orchestrates a finale in which the kids kidnap evil Mr. Muckle, tie him to a chair and raid his office for incriminating evidence. How do you think the kids' methods might go over if they'd been protesting an abortion clinic, instead of protecting a bunch of defenseless owls? Their actions could give other kids the wrong idea about how to handle situations like these.

"Hooters" may be out of luck, but with Jimmy Buffett on board as a producer and in a small part as the kids' surf-crazy marine science teacher, at least "Parrotheads" will have something to look forward to.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]