MOVIE REVIEWS: YOUNGSTER, OLDSTER TALES OF DERRING-DO : ‘Restless Natives’ Stage High Jinks in the Highlands

Where do Scottish movies get their charm? From a temperament which lends itself to understatement? From the mists and mysteries of the country itself? Or from an unsuspected vein of looniness, fed by Glen Fiddich and Glen Livet? Hard to tell, but it is most certainly charm, thick as mortar, that wins the day in “Restless Natives” (Friday at the Cineplex, Beverly Center).

Without it, our two young heroes might not establish the hammerlock on our affections that they so clearly do. Sweet, storklike Will (Vincent Friell) and stubby, parentless Ronnie (Joe Mullaney), forever pushing his Scotch-taped glasses back on his nose.

Chronically underemployed, richly overimaginative, the two concoct a goofy scheme to get pocket money and respect simultaneously: Rubber-masked as Wolfman and Bozo the Clown, they’ll become Edinburgh’s Robin Hoods (or more precisely, Rob Roys, the legendary redheaded Scottish outlaw). Their victims will be the rich visitors on the tour buses that crisscross the neighboring Highlands every day.

Everything has to work to keep an audience’s good will when your comedy has a basically antisocial premise, and “Restless Natives” works. Partly from Ninian Dunnett’s canny screenplay, partly from the ebullience with which all the cast--and especially Mullaney and Friell--performs under Michael Hoffman’s direction.

We have Will to enunciate our moral qualms, to be wracked with guilt and joyless at their mounting success. We have Ronnie’s absolute deadpan at his work, dispensing “nasty sugar,” stink bombs, rubber spiders and plastic doggie mistakes in a cluttered novelty store. And we have furious physical humor as a small motor scooter, carrying a Mutt-and-Jeff Wolfman and Bozo the Clown, attempts to outrun a tour bus.

Writer Dunnett (who won a screenwriting competition with the script) characterizes the boys carefully. Ronnie--who has graveside chats with a departed mother and father--alone, except for his hamster; Will, with his concerned parents and precocious sister Isla. And he makes real the cramped grayness of the council flats where they both live.

Most of all, we understand what these boys mean to each other, an equation that gets tested when Will is smitten by an enchanting tour bus guide (Teri Lally) and contrives to get to know her.

Although the robberies, held at the point of a puffer-gun filled with sneeze powder, delight rather than incense the tourists, two lawmen are soon after them: Robert Urquhart, the Scottish fisherman-detective superintendent, and Ned Beatty, the overwrought vacationing CIA man, an accidental passenger on their first bus.

Director Hoffman makes the film’s high-spirited hilarity and its muted beauty work for him, distracting us from a few hard questions--mostly to do with police methods or the lack of them. Since Oliver Stapleton (of “Absolute Beginners” as well as “My Beautiful Laundrette”) was the film’s superb cameraman, since Big Country performs its grand Celtic-sounding score and since the countryside around Strathclyde was its hushed and mythic setting, it’s easy to be distracted. ‘RESTLESS NATIVES’

An Orion Classics Release of a Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment Ltd. presentation of an Oxford Film Company Production. Producer Rick Stevenson. Executive producer Mark Bentley. Director Michael Hoffman. Screenplay Ninian Dunnett. Co-producer/production manager Andy Paterson. Associate producer Paddy Higson. Camera Oliver Stapleton. Editor Sean Barton. Music composed by Stuart Adamson, arranged and performed by Big Country. Production design Adrienne Atkinson. Costumes Mary Jane Reyner. Art director Andy Harris. Sound Louis Kramer. With Vincent Friell, Joe Mullaney, Teri Lally, Ned Beatty, Robert Urquart, Bernard Hill, Ann Scott-Jones, Rachel Boyd, Iain McColl, Bryan Forbes, Nanette Newman.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.