I feel like a real bully for giving this imaginative and clever film a relatively low score. But I can’t help it when so much of its right but way more of its wrong. So call me Scut Farkus because I was routinely bored by this flick.

It’s about three kids who set off on an epic quest to gather the ingredients to make a blueberry pie for their sick mother. It’s not so easy when you don’t have any money… and when there’s a family of ne’er-do-wells who bought the last carton of eggs and won’t share.

The film is shot to look like the 70s but all the modern smart phones tell us otherwise. It’s a clever gimmick and is, I think, meant to imply the outdoor freedom that ’70s kids had while being an otherwise modern film. Its dirty, low-fi ’70s look is very well done… and these kids are natural and charming, especially the very aggressive girl. Aesthetics and most of the acting is on point… though, to be fair, not all the kid actors are top tier talents.

Unfortunately, the film is almost two hours long and the director has a problem sticking incessantly to slow, drawn-out scenes. If the film had more energy and faster, more interesting pacing, it’d have been a real winner. But I felt the film ground to a halt on way too many occasions to have actually enjoyed it.

It’s so unfortunate this film dies in the editing when its otherwise an endearing project. I love the Goonies but with lower stakes vibe. It could have been a modern classic but winds up being a shadow of what it wanted to be.

Score: 74