The tag line for this Jonathan Frakes film should be, "Need a decent babysitter?" Perfectly harmless and imaginative enough, Clockstoppers is like a Saturday-morning cartoon — adults will snooze while the transfixed kiddies lose valuable reading time.

The hook here is a watch that can in effect freeze time — it allows whoever’s wearing it to speed up his own molecular structure so much that everything else in the world seems to come to a standstill. In other words, the wearer can go around town doing whatever he pleases to other humans. For kids, this beats having a calculator watch. And so the most enjoyable part of Clockstoppers, by far, is when high-schooler Zak Gibbs (Jesse Bradford) comes across the watch among his scientist dad’s things. At first he has a ball, using it to harass a meter maid, pull his pal’s pants down, and woo the new girl in school. Of course, some very bad men in a secretive lab think the watch belongs to them. And when the film shifts into humdrum thriller mode, you’ll wish you had a watch that could speed up time.