Starring Kristen Stewart and Corbin Bleu. Rated general.

Ocean's Eleven meets Bugsy Malone in Catch That Kid!, the latest in a rash of "kids with gadgets" adventure movies begat by the success of Robert Rodriguez's hyperkinetic Spy Kids series.

A remake of the Danish Klatretosen, CTK is a reasonably well executed heist film whose story is designed around its stunt sequences. In order to put 12-year-olds into peril, the story goes like this: Maddy (Kristen Stewart) needs $250,000 to finance experimental surgery for her ailing dad (Sam Robards). Turns out that mom (Jennifer Beals) is a security consultant with access to a bank. The bank's vault is cradled within a hydraulic system that lifts it a hundred feet from the floor, where it is encircled with cameras, motion detectors, dogs, and guards. Good thing that Maddy is an expert mountain climber and that her best school chums are a computer whiz (Corbin Bleu) and a master mechanic/driver (Max Thierot).

Not the most plausible story, but greatly entertaining to my seven-year-old daughter, who declared CTK to be "worth a good review". In other words, the Bart Freundlich ­directed movie does its job.

I wonder, though, about its moral content. The glamorization of grand theft and high-risk sports is not as troubling as the means by which Maddy turns her buddies into accomplices. Plainly put, she seduces the love-struck lads by telling each that she prefers him to the other. This ploy is meant to strike comic sparks but the effect is to turn Maddie into a sexually manipulative shrew. That she goes to these lengths for the sake of daddy merely adds another layer of perturbing subtext. It's almost as perverse as Barney.