'Milk Money' (PG-13)

His initial reading of the script must have told Ed Harris that "Milk Money" was garbage: a work of utter nonsense, a waste of his time.

Bless his heart, though, Harris dove right in and acted. And he's a lot of fun to watch as a mild-mannered suburban widower whose 12-year-old son tries to get him hitched to a big-city call girl. Melanie Griffith does an equally appealing turn as the call girl, and she and Harris send sparks flying whenever they don't have to share their scenes with kids.

Alas, kids rule this dreadful comedy. They overwhelm it with their trite high jinks and unfunny vomit jokes. They stomp the subtleties out of practically every scene they take part in.

But let's not blame it all on the kids. Let's take a swipe at first-time screenwriter John Mattson, whose plot makes only the feeblest attempts at plausiblity. And let's also lay some critical noogies on director Richard Benjamin, who took a rickety script and turned it into a crummy movie.

Question: Will Hollywood ever retire the Hooker With a Heart of Gold? The concept is so ancient, so hackneyed, so ready to be laid to rest, you'd think producers would laugh at any writer who dared to propose it. But once again, they didn't laugh. They brandished checkbooks.

"Milk Money" tells the tale of Frank Wheeler (Michael Patrick Carter), who joins his preadolescent pals (Adam LaVorgna and Brian Christopher) on a quest for sexual pleasure. Mounting their bicycles in the leafy suburb of Middleton, they ride into the big city (unnamed here but played by Pittsburgh).

The boys aim to hire a prostitute to get naked for them. But they're promptly spotted by a lowlife, who leads them to a remote parking lot and pulls a gun. Sitting a few feet from the robbery, entertaining a client in a limo, is V (Griffith). She rescues the kids but loses her client, who drives off in fright.

V learns what the boys are up to and takes them to her apartment, where she drops her halter top for a few seconds before shooing them out. Later, she sees them stranded in a downpour -- their bikes have been stolen -- and borrows her pimp's car to drive them back to Middleton. The car breaks down outside Frank's house, and V goes inside to use the phone. Right around then, Frank, whose real mom died in childbirth, gets the idea that V would make a good stepmom.

The movie suddenly comes to life as Dad and V take over. He thinks she's a math tutor. She thinks he knows the truth about her occupation. Soon they're engaged in a long, hilarious conversation that revolves around this misunderstanding.

"I think I could help you," V says, staring into his eyes.

"Well, Frank's the one who could really use a few sessions, not me."

"Why is that?"

"Well, you know, I don't really use it anymore."

"You don't?"

"Well, maybe a little every day, like at the bank and the grocery store . . . . "

The movie's energy dissipates as soon as the kids come back into the picture. And though Dad and V have a few more pleasing scenes together and evenutally fall in love, "Milk Money" goes sour well before the halfway point.

Preposterous plot twists have V hiding out in Frank's tree house, and Dad duking it out pointlessly with another father at a school mixer. There's an angry gangster, a car chase, an explosion and fire and, yes, the obligatory sequence in which the lovers split up.

Harris and Griffith are both classy performers, and both seem to be working hard to salvage this picture. What a waste of talent.

MILK MONEY (PG-13) — Mild violence, mild profanity and brief glimpses of pornographic videos.