A pair like Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola should be pumping out something good every year. Anderson’s gotten flack recently, I guess for being goofy and self-inflated, but his movies have always been impressive until this one.

Moonrise Kingdom is a film about a young couple in the ’60s who escape their parents and scout masters to live in the woods. They listen to records and swim until they quickly fall in love.

The small island community takes up arms to track the missing children, ruining all of their fun and forcing them on the lam.

The film promises to be fun and exciting, candy-colored and stylized like all Wes Anderson pictures, and certainly the first 30 minutes are. But the great characters introduced never get a chance to grow or change, and the great cast of adults (Frances McDormand, Ed Norton, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray) never really get to act.

It’s as if Anderson and Coppola wrote right up to the meat of the story and stopped. There’s no inner conflict or complex relationship; just a long chase scene and an 80-minute rip-off. It could have been a great movie if they had written the rest of it.