‘North’ (PG)

Rob Reiner seems to have lost his sense of direction in "North," an embarrassing comedy about a perfect preteen (Elijah Wood) who divorces his noxious parents only to learn after 88 of the most painful minutes in movie history that there's no place like home.

Wood, though a fetching child, spends most of the movie as popeyed as an over-excited Chihuahua, acting out young North's dismay at the things the big'uns do. North is the dream of all the other parents in his neighborhood. He has good grades and a most excellent batting average and always gets the lead in the school play. But his own parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander) are too busy talking about their own lives to appreciate him.

When their self- obsession begins to erode his self-esteem, North goes to his private place -- an easy chair in a mall furniture store -- to think about his problems. Then it comes to him: He'll divorce his parents and become a free agent. He discusses his plan with the editor of the school paper, the fiendish Winchell (Mathew McCurley), who prints the story in a special edition. North's folks fall into a coma -- no, really -- when they learn of their son's suit and are unable to make their case before a wacky judge (Alan Arkin), who rules in North's favor.

With help from his ambulance-chasing attorney (Jon Lovitz), North sifts through parenting proposals from all over the globe. Thus begins his mostly tiresome search for the perfect parents, a series of offensive regional and ethnic caricatures portrayed by a panoply of much-to-be-pitied players. The first of the lot are Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire as Ma and Pa Tex, who like everything too big. Next there are the Hawaiians (too insecure), the Eskimos (who euthanize poor old Grandpa), the Africans (Mom goes topless), the Amish (too boring), the Chinese (bad hairstyles) and the French (Jerry Lewis movie on every channel).

The ideal parents -- surprise, surprise -- turn out to be a pair of white New York suburbanites. While Ward (John Ritter) and Donna Nelson (Faith Ford) are marvelous, North senses that something is missing. His guardian angel (smirky Bruce Willis), who appears in a variety of guises throughout the picture, explains, "The Nelsons were good folks. They're just not your folks."

Having grasped this great truth, North decides to return to his true parents, but it won't be as easy as he had thought. Alas, while he has been globe-trotting, his lawyer and Winchell have founded a children's revolution, which will falter if the Norths reconcile. Now a powerful political figure, Winchell sends one of his armed adult henchmen to make a martyr of his old schoolmate. Kindergartners write better than this using blocks.

"North," which co-producer Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman adapted from Zweibel's slight novel, is awkwardly structured -- it's still in chapters -- not to mention mean-spirited and incredibly stupid. Its episodic style and the occasional borscht-belt joke make it seem more like it was directed by Mel Brooks than by the man who gave us such happy kidult fare as "The Princess Bride." But this movie is aimed at neither kids nor adults; it simply isn't aimed. When you're lost, it is useful to remember that moss grows to the north.