DIARY OF A WIMPY KID (2010) (***1/2)

Having been based on Jeff Kinney's young adult book, which was based on a collection of comic strips, I wondered how the film would work as a feature film. With its stream of consciousness style, the book doesn't have the narrative structure that a feature would need to sustain momentum. But with a few tweaks to the original text, the film finds a focus, giving Kinney's keen middle school observations even more punch.

Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon, THE BROTHERS BLOOM) is about to start middle school and his anxiety is growing by the minute. He believes it is the dumbest idea ever invented because it mixes kids who haven't hit their growth spurt like him with gorillas who have to shave their bodies twice daily. He worries about saying or doing the wrong thing. Making matters worse is his best friend Rowley (Robert Capron, THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE), who still plays with toys, listens to boy bands and is completely oblivious to the rules of tweendom. His older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick, LAND OF THE DEAD), a high schooler in a band called Löded Diper, puts the fear into him by saying he won't even survive his first day.

Greg is determined to be in the top ten in school popularity by year's end. He joins the wrestling team and gets pinned by the school's biggest freak Fregley (Grayson Russell, TALLADEGA NIGHTS). He tries out for the play and gets cast as a tree. He signs up for the school's safety patrol for the free hot chocolate and when someone tells him it's the least cool thing for him to do, he thinks they're crazy. His sense of his own place in the school hierarchy is inflated to say the least.

What made Greg so unique in the books and now the film is that he's not a hero. He is selfish and lazy and has a chip in his shoulder, but despite it his eagerness in the face of cluelessness and dry wit make him charming. He's embarrassed by Rowley, but ironically his round friend fairs better because he's just himself. When the seventh grader Angie Steadman (Chloe Grace Moretz, KICK-ASS) talks to them, Rowley is just happy a girl said two words to him, but Greg fears getting seen with a strange girl reading HOWL under the bleachers. Reading unassigned books is like social suicide don't you?

Middle school is a cruel place for the awkward. One can become a social pariah by breaking some arbitrary rule they never knew existed. At Greg's school a piece of cheese was left out in the playground to mold and anyone who even accidentally brushes by it is branded with the "cheese touch." Oh the ridicule Greg had to face when Rowley asked him to come over and "play" in the hall. This film gets all these details right.

What it also gets right is how cruelty trickles down from the awkward to the oblivious. This is the age where "games" aren't fun unless someone is humiliated or hurt. Why is throwing a football at a friend riding a Big Wheel entertaining? It's a cutthroat world where tough moral dilemmas plague you everyday. What is really the right thing to do — confess that you were the one chasing elementary kids with worms or let your best friend take one for the team because he was wrong in loaning you his jacket?

Middle school is like war as kids transition into their teen years. They get thrown quickly into a more mature setting overnight, while they try to figure out what of their younger years they can hold onto. This film has sympathy for how difficult it is to navigate the landmine-filled terrain.