CAMPING IT UP

Now in the multiplexes:

Summer Camp--As she's been doing for most of the last three decades, Diane Keaton here cranks out another fluffy senior chick-flick comedy. The formula, seen in the Book Club flicks and Mack & Rita and others, is simple: Assemble Keaton and some other big names popular with the AARP crowd in a pleasant setting for some undemanding romance and mild slapstick, then pad it out to at least an hour and a half.

In this one, written and directed by Castille Landon, Keaton finds herself at Camp Pinnacle, nestled in gorgeous forest scenery in North Carolina, at a camp reunion with cohorts Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard. Keaton is a widowed hotshot biotech exec; Woodard is an accomplished but unhappily married nurse who really wanted to be doctor, and Bates is a rich celebrity self-help author with a devoted following. They met at Camp Pinnacle as kids, and Bates is trying to make them keep their vow they'd always stay pals.

Other mature favorites are around, like Beverly D'Angelo as the adult version of the pretty-girl alpha, Eugene Levy as a love interest for Keaton and Dennis Haysbert as a love interest for Woodard. As a bone to anyone under fifty who wanders in, Betsy Sodaro, Josh Peck and Nicole Richie are thrown in as camp staffers.

This movie is quite terrible, but all three of the leads are high on the list of the best film actors of the last fifty years. It's possible to react to this in two ways; one, that it's a disgrace they all aren't doing something better with their time and glorious talents, or, two, that it's simply great to see them, and to see them together, hanging out, being silly, and making money as leading ladies. Indeed, it seems to be possible to react to Summer Camp in both of these ways at the same time.

If they're going to keep doing stuff like this, however, it really seems like Keaton and cronies could find somebody to write them some snappier dialogue than the meandering stuff they shrug out here. Most shocking, perhaps, was how the filmmakers went to the trouble to hire Eugene Levy, only to use him as a bland straight man to Keaton. He's still charming, but he had, I think, one laugh line of his own. Maybe it was a nice summer vacation for him.