NIM'S ISLAND

Directed by Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett. Starring Jodie Foster, Abigail Breslin, Gerard Butler, Alphonso McAuley, Michael Carman, Peter Callan PG cert, gen release, 96 min
Photograph: The Irish Times

WHAT is wrong with Jodie Foster? Ever since she acquired children she has done little else but make films in which women fret over endangered little ones. Remember Anna and the King, Panic Room and Flightplan ?

Now we have the chaotic, illogical Nim's Island. Jodie really should consider keeping her personal anxieties to herself.

This deeply strange adaptation of a children's novel by Wendy Orr finds young Nim (Abigail Breslin) living on a remote island in the Pacific with her father (Gerard Butler), a celebrated naturalist. Their home blends the rustic with the incongruously well-appointed - the walls may be made of matting, but the tables groan beneath the latest Apple Macs - and their daily lives feature a similar blend of hardship and tropical luxury.

One terrible day, dad gets lost at sea and Nim is forced to ask for help from the popular novelist with whom she has been in e-mail contact. Nim believes the writer to be a burly man with a taste for adventure, but she is, in fact, an agoraphobic woman from a smart quarter of San Francisco. It's Jodie Foster.

Nim's Island , which is basically an overcomplicated version of the sort of Disney flick Foster used to enliven 30 years ago, does have plenty of nice scenery, and it shows certain cute animals to their best advantage. Unfortunately it makes absolutely no sense and is poorly cast throughout. Butler continues to act with his upper incisors alone, and Breslin's permanent astonishment is fast becoming tiresome.

But, surprisingly, it is Foster who offers the weakest performance. As her character stumbles clumsily from her house and makes her way to the southern oceans, a terrible realisation comes over the viewer: Jodie Foster is attempting slapstick. What next? Jessica Alba doing Shakespeare? Liv Ullman juggling midgets? Foster may be many things, but she's no Harold Lloyd.

© 2008 The Irish Times