Rush hour? Traffic jams? Lines at the supermarket? Nim never heard of 'em. That's because where she lives, on a remote island in the South Pacific, there are no such things.
Nim's Island is a comic adventure about an island-dwelling girl and the best-selling author she summons in her hour of need.
Abigail Breslin plays Nim, an 11-year-old fan of the adventure novels of Alexandra Rover (played by Jodie Foster, right), creator of the literary globe-trotting hero, Alex Rover. Nim loses herself in the imaginative escapist tales, substituting the face of her dad for that of the iconic protagonist.
Her widowed scientist father, a marine biologist played by Gerard Butler, is a researcher of microscopic creatures, and the two of them are the only residents of their idyllic paradise. Their home is a tree hut and Nim's friends are the local animals -- a sea lion, a pelican, and a lizard, oh my!
When her father goes missing during a storm at sea and their island is threatened with the arrival of a buccaneer-themed cruise ship, she contacts reclusive author Alex(andra) Rover and asks for help.
Rover, although sympathetic to Nim's plight, is agoraphobic and hasn't left her San Francisco apartment in years. But she overcomes her many fears (well, she temporarily ignores them, anyway) and somehow manages to take a parade of vehicles and make her klutzy way to the titular location.
It should be what's-wrong-with-this-picture fun to see Foster play slapstick comedy, which she does here, because it's not something she has done much of during her storied, two-Oscar career. Now we know why: she's no good at it.
The co-writer-directors, real-life husband-and-wife Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, working on an adaptation of the book by Wendy Orr along with screenwriters Joseph Kwong and Paula Mazur, mix comedy and pathos with a distinct lack of skill. Worse, they condescend to their young audience by either allowing or demanding painful overacting, and they tend to repeat gags and bits -- which aren't very good in the first place -- over and over.
They depend on the animals to be cute and the slapstick sequences to be funny. Are they? Not even close.
The three primary performers have minimal interaction, so there is a lot of talking to oneself, which gets old pretty fast. And as talented as Miss Breslin is, she cannot give the film what it unfairly asks of her. Add that to Foster's obvious discomfort doing physical comedy and you've got one supremely annoying family film.
As a children's film it does score points for promoting reading and writing and the use of imagination. But the production values are pedestrian at best. You can just feel the fanciful material being drained of its charm and magic as it gets transferred from the suggestive page to the literal screen.
And as the screenwriters make fun of obnoxious tourists, they miss the irony that it is the film itself that acts like one, and that it gets progressively worse until, by the final reels, it has turned into an amateurish community theatre production.
So we'll travel to 2 stars out of 4 for this strained and frenetic kidventure. Youngsters may respond to the cutesy wildlife on hand, but oldsters in attendance will find themselves longing to be voted off Nim's Island.
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Abigail Breslin plays Nim, an 11-year-old fan of the adventure novels of Alexandra Rover (played by Jodie Foster, right), creator of the literary globe-trotting hero, Alex Rover. Nim loses herself in the imaginative escapist tales, substituting the face of her dad for that of the iconic protagonist.
