100 min | PG | September 15, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
A trio of inner-city kids ships off to a Christian summer camp run by Christopher Lloyd. One of them stumbles onto a hidden fortune and the criminals who want it back. The camp is the only thing here with anywhere to hide.
Noah is a city kid who would rather hustle on the street than spend a summer at a Christian wilderness camp. His mother sends him anyway. Once there, he discovers a stash of hidden valuables and the men willing to hurt children to retrieve it. The film stages a turf war between a wisecracking preteen and a pair of bumbling thieves on camp grounds. Camp Hideout wants to be a faith-based survival comedy and a Home Alone retread at the same time, and it commits fully to neither.
Ethan Drew plays Noah with a permanent smirk that the script mistakes for charisma. He delivers every line like he is waiting for the laugh track. Corbin Bleu plays Jake, the camp counselor, with an earnestness that the material never earns. Christopher Lloyd plays Falco, the camp’s eccentric caretaker, and he reaches for the manic energy that made him famous decades ago. He finds only the gestures. Amanda Leighton plays Selena as the patient adult in a film full of cartoons, and she gives the most grounded work on screen.
Sean Olson directs from a script by C. Neil Davenport, Kat Olson, and Dave DeBorde, and the seams between three writers show in every scene. The slapstick set pieces, where the thieves take pratfalls into mud and rope traps, are blocked without timing. The camera sits flat and wide and waits for the gag to arrive rather than building to it. The score telegraphs every emotional beat with a swell that arrives before the moment does. The production design renders the camp as a generic backlot clearing with no sense of place.
The film cannot decide whether it wants to scare children or reassure them, so it does both at half strength. The thieves are too goofy to threaten and too violent to ignore. Noah’s redemption arc resolves in a single conversation because the script has no patience for the work that would make it land. Camp Hideout takes a proven formula and copies the shape without understanding why the original worked.