Only kids will be able to identify with this film

Shorts
Cast: Jon Cryer, William H. Macy,Leslie Mann
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Rating: **

Structured as five short stories connected by Toe’s irksome narration, Shorts surges forward and rewinds, pauses and skips around as if controlled by a remote-wielding toddler. This narrative device, assisted by appropriate on-screen graphics, soon becomes tiresome, but it’s emblematic of a film that is dancing as fast as it can to entertain. Yet despite a plot crammed with mini-aliens, maxi-crocodiles and a variously sized James Spader, the movie never engages more than our eyes.

The story’s MacGuffin is a rainbow-hued wishing rock that bounces from one character to another, granting computer-generated fantasies and causing predictable pandemonium. Since this is a tale for tykes, the rock must enlighten as well as gratify; so the avaricious owner of Black Box (a criminally underextended Mr. Spader) learns that his children need more attention than his bank balance, while Toe’s workaholic parents (Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann) finally comprehend that talking is healthier than texting. Everyone learns what it means to be terrorized by technology — something of a paradox in a movie whose characters, story and emotions are fatally subordinate to a tsunami of special effects.

The least convincing of these invigorate the Black Box, the company’s sole product: a strange, multipurpose gadget that resembles an ebony Rubik’s Cube and can serve as everything from a cheese grater to a solar panel. Presenting a labor-saving device whose development monopolizes the time and labor of every adult in Black Falls, the movie revels in an absurdity that parents will appreciate even if their kids do not.

Concocted by Robert Rodriguez, a kind of filmmaking Black Box (he wrote, directed, edited, produced, photographed, composed some of the music and supervised the visual effects), Shorts feels underwritten and overdressed. Though adept at homing in on the things that kids find hilarious — boogers, loogies, not-blinking contests — Mr. Rodriguez (whose bifurcated brain flips easily from Grindhouse gore to Spy Kids kookiness) leaves his adults in the lurch. Even the estimable William H. Macy, as a germophobic scientist, is forced to play most of his scenes from inside a Hazmat suit.

Thank heavens for little Jolie Vanier. As Helvetica Black, whose Beryl the Peril demeanor and ingenious nickname (Typeface) enliven many a doldrum, this pint-size Christina Ricci is a real find. She’s not enough, though, to rescue a movie so conventional as to urge us to be careful what we wish for. Like a sequel, perhaps?