Review/Film; 'MAC and Me,' Family From a Distant Planet

If you made a film about a homesick extraterrestrial befriended by a little boy, would you dare to have the creature look like E. T.'s cousin? ''MAC and Me'' is such a shameless clone that its cute little alien has E. T.'s gangly, prune-skinned body, his elongated arms and fingers, his enormous, mournful eyes - that look of a cross between an infant and his own grandfather. Only a 2-year-old or an amnesiac might be surprised at any of this film's Spielbergian turns. Fortunately, there is some residual charm left in these borrowings, so ''MAC and Me'' may be mildly amusing to children too impatient to wait for the ''E. T.'' video to be released this fall.

At the start, NASA captures a neat nuclear family - Mama Alien, Papa Alien, sister and baby brother - but they break loose from the space agency's lab. Somehow the littlest alien is separated and finds his way to Los Angeles. There he finds a single mom (Christine Ebersole), with a teen-age son and a younger child named Eric. The furniture is mysteriously rearranged, the television set turns on when it isn't plugged in, and soon Eric discovers MAC - the Mysterious Alien Creature.

The story's only original turn is that Eric is in a wheelchair. For a time this seems like a thoughtful, uncondescending statement about the ability of handicapped people to do everything. Eric is a smart, strong and self-sufficient hero. But it is alarming when he and his chair fall off a cliff and into a river - even if MAC is predictably there to save him from drowning. And by the time the film sends Eric careering into heavy traffic, the apparent thoughtfulness has turned awfully irresponsible.

With its cardboard family and familiar aliens, ''MAC and Me'' would seem like the generic version of ''E. T.'' if it were not so full of brand-name commercials. Coke is the drink that revives dying aliens. Mom works at Sears, whose logo is all over the place. A huge birthday party takes place at McDonald's, where MAC dances around disguised in a bear suit. His brief dance and a scene in which the reunited family wanders into a supermarket are the film's least derivative and most appealing episodes.

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