Railroaded into a sort of kids' concentration camp over a pair of missing baseball cleats, a very young Shia Labeouf indiscriminately digs pits in the desert all day, suffering ridicule at the hands of counselors and campers alike. The big lie is that this kind of hard labor builds character for troubled youths, but in reality it's just a cut-rate treasure hunt that pits the kids against each other, their supervisors and the world at large.

With maybe one or two exceptions, everyone in this film is a jerk. Those who aren't needlessly cruel are functionally inept. Even Labeouf's bashful lead character eventually lets the stress and grimy heat get to him, lashing out at the only kid lower on the totem pole before eventually, grudgingly, making amends. There's a flashback story about a wild west outlaw and a lost cache of some sort, a dual tragedy that coincidentally connects primary characters through a set of crossed bloodlines, but that subplot is eye-roll bad, both in terms of writing and production. I can remember after-school specials with more conviction.

I'm not sure how this thing drew such a recognizable cast, either. Jon Voight plays up a thick cowboy accent as the meanest of the adults, the only memorable performance of the bunch. Sigourney Weaver pops in to ruffle feathers and look grouchy, but her role is superfluous and shallow. Henry Winkler gets about five minutes to putz around as Shia's scatterbrained father. Patricia Arquette appears in the old western scenes, plodding through an absurdly hammy interracial relationship before going rogue and riding off into the sunset. The plot just doesn't produce much more than a cascade of punishment with limited retribution. It's an effort that obviously wants to be quirky and playful, amusing the kids while teaching important life lessons, but doesn't seem capable enough to pull it off.