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The Battle of Shaker Heights

Starring Shia LaBeouf, Amy Smart and Elden…

The Battle of Shaker Heights

Starring Shia LaBeouf, Amy Smart and Elden Henson

Directed by Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle

“The Battle of Shaker Heights” would be better off on network television than in theaters. The padding commercials provide would help its 75-minute running time be less embarrassing; it would probably be easier to forgive the stiffness of Erica Beeney’s screenplay; and the film’s slapdash production qualities wouldn’t be so glaring.

The film would have been better off if all of us who watched this season of HBO’s “Project Greenlight” hadn’t been privy to all of the filmmakers’ screw-ups. It’s distracting when you know that it’s actually night in that shot that’s supposed to look like day, that that’s actually a production van that wasn’t supposed to drive through the shot, and that the climactic group hug that never comes was cut out because it was too cheesy.

It also would also be better off if Miramax had given said filmmakers a chance in hell of making a decent film. It’s a criticism that’s certainly been made before, but the contest – the brainchild of the divine Matt Damon and Ben Affleck – sets its winners up with substantially less time and money than most independent filmmakers who actually know how to make a movie require. It sets them up to fail and, in the process, casts them in a spectacularly catty, high-tension reality show.

The incidental product of that show, “Shaker Heights,” is the story of Kelly Ernswiler (Shia LaBeouf), a jaded but likable teenage smart-ass who’s got a few life lessons to learn. He has to give up his obsession with war, realize that Amy Smart (playing Kelly’s friend’s sister, who’s engaged to be married) is too old and hot for him and finally forgive his father for choosing drug addiction over parenting.

Kelly’s war obsession is a shallow version of Harold’s death obsession in “Harold and Maude” – Kelly drives a military Jeep instead of a hearse and participates in battle reenactments instead of faking his own death. His ambiguously depicted rendezvous with Amy Smart’s character is far-fetched and unearned by the filmmakers. The storyline of Kelly’s conflict with his father is barely there – HBO viewers know that the studio pressured the filmmakers throughout the editing process to boost the comedy and downplay the drama as much as possible – and as a result, the film lacks a center.

At least it’s better than the first “Project Greenlight” birth, the insufferably weepy “Stolen Summer.”

The only one who survives is the ultra-charismatic LaBeouf, who we’re sure to see more of in the future. This kid could have debuted in Affleck’s last atrocity, “Gigli,” and still have been a sensation.