E.T. phones home from the Nevada desert in Andy Fickman's special effects-laden reworking of the Disney adventure Escape To Witch Mountain. Almost 30 years after the original, this slick and sprightly revamp ticks all of the boxes with ruthless efficiency, introducing a dog at the halfway point to increase the ahh factor for family audiences.

Race to Witch Mountain makes good use of leading man Dwayne Johnson, who copes easily with the physical rigours of his role as a speedy taxi driver, and continues to sharpen his comic timing. His gung-ho hero greets each ludicrous twist with a withering look of disbelief then gets on with the serious business of fighting an alien bounty hunter, breaking into a top secret government facility and saving the world from destruction.

“You got a death wish?” screeches one unnamed character. “I drive a cab in Vegas” replies Johnson dryly.

Johnson plays Jack, a one-time wheelman for the Mob, who has cleaned up his act since getting out of prison, but is now under intense pressure to return to his criminal ways. During a daytime patrol of the gambling capital, Jack is shocked to discover two children, siblings Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig), in the back seat of the cab. They offer him a bundle of cash to drive them to a remote cabin in the desert. Jack reluctantly obliges and en route, the taxi is almost forced off the road by federal agents under the leadership of Burke (Ciaran Hinds).

Demanding answers from his passengers, Jack learns that Sara and Seth are extra-terrestrials, who have come to Earth to retrieve an artefact that will save their dying planet from destruction and halt an invasion of our third rock from the sun.

Completely out of his depth, Jack heads for a sci-fi convention on the strip where Dr Alex Friedman (Carla Gugino) just happens to be giving a lecture on Astrophysical Anomaly Detection. Together, they seek out the children’s spaceship, which Sara and Seth need to return home.

Featuring cameos from Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, child stars of the 1975 film, Race To Witch Mountain delivers enough thrills and spills to hold our attention for 98 minutes. Some of the effects are a little workmanlike, but, for the most part, director Fickman unleashes computer-generated fury with assurance.

Johnson gels nicely with his otherworldly co-stars. Hinds is a two-dimensional, pantomime villain but nothing more is required of him in a big budget film that keeps the tone light and airy by leaving plenty of holes in the plot.

‘If that boy were an apple, he’d be a Delicious!” coos a smitten, female high school student as Zac Efron’s teen dreamboat struts through the hallways of 17 Again. For the next hour-and-a-half, Burr Steers’s body-swap comedy bows down at the altar of the High School Musical pin-up as he single-handedly teaches the young people of the world how to behave with dignity.

Don’t have sex before marriage, don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke, don’t throw parties when your parents are away, respect your elders, stand up to bullies, support your friends, dress like you’ve stepped out of a fashion catalogue. Follow the gospel of Zac and you too can have girls swooning in your wake and guys clamouring to be your buddy.

17 Again is glossy wish fulfilment writ large. Thirty-seven year-old Mike O’Donnell (Matthew Perry) feels like he has been dealt successively bad hands by fate, with no end in sight to his misery. His wife Scarlett (Leslie Mann) has thrown him out, his children Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Alex (Sterling Knight) despise him and, to add insult to injury, he has just been passed over for promotion at work. In a freakish twist, Mike tumbles over a bridge into a whirlpool and is magically transformed into his 17-year-old self (Efron).

Having recovered from shock, Mike realises his new look is a gift not a curse. In his guise as the new boy, Mike bonds with his daughter and son, showing them the error of their hormone-driven ways (“When you’re young, everything feels like the end of the world”) whilst reminding Scarlett that her marriage isn’t broken beyond repair.

17 Again opens with a gratuitous shot of Efron topless, dripping with sweat, practising his sharp shooting on the basketball court. A dance number panders shamelessly to fans of High School Musical before the plot fast-forwards to the present day and a simple premise borrowed wholesale from It’s A Wonderful Life.