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Abigail Breslin and Jodie Foster in Nims Island

Nim's Island

Anything may happen on fantasy island, but sadly there's no magic

Friday, May 02, 2008

What happens when Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin star in a family comedy set on a desert island populated by computer generated animals? Noel McAdam finds out

Abigail Breslin, Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler

Alex Rover writes the kind of high derring-do novels in which the hero is always getting flung head first into live lava volcanoes.

But in real life Rover is cruelly mis-named. She, for it is a she, is afraid to even go outside the door.

Going to retrieve the mail is akin to the same kind of full-scale adventures she plots for the books.

Nim, on the other hand, is an 11-year-old girl living the kind of life Alex can only dream of ... on a remote South Pacific Island.

Yet her favourite pastime is reading the latest Rover, sent by sea with the quarterly provisions.

She envisages Alex as a hat-clad Indiana Jones type adventurer, continually obsessed with the various methods by which he may meet his maker.

And the real Alex somehow conjures up precisely the same fantasy figure, as some kind of counselling alter-ego.

A fairly convoluted plot brings both ladies together ... eventually.

Jodie Foster's return to family film-making, arguably for the first time since Anna and the King in 1999, tries very hard to be a bundle of fun. But while they seem to be having a raucous good time up on the screen, you may not be sitting down there in the cinema.

Foster, who these days insists she cannot bear to watch her own teenage performances (including Tallulah in Bugsy Malone and the sassy hooker in Taxi Driver) gives the most over-the-top eye-popping performance of her career.

Breslin, who as Nim is insisting she is no little girl any more, plays the archetypal all-rounder dream kid who's not only surf-smart but, as I say, loves to read.

She has never been off the Lost-style island she shares with her dad. Mum is, typically, long gone and dad gets stranded on the high seas after a perfect storm. So he is out of the picture for long periods, literally, leaving Nim and her computer-generated animal family to cope.

After a strong start, if you go with the flow, the movie begins to come apart in act two when a full tourist cruise manages to find the secret island, forcing Nim to stage a retaliatory eruption from said volcano.

Though there are some decent comedy scenes, the movie is putting too much emphasis on cute, and Foster doesn't pull off funny, coming across as eccentric and off-key instead.

At times it seems the movie has only two gears — top and beyond top; constant hysteria is the disorder of the day. The repeated e-mails between Alex and Nim can be tiresome.

Breslin, who has been in eight movies since Little Miss Sunshine (and that was only two years ago) is ideally cast.

But for Foster, who needs a change from her one-woman-army roles like Flight Plan, Panic Room and Brave One, this may not be the way to go.

The film is co-directed and part written by Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, who were both involved in the Wimbledon rom-com a few years back.

On a wet weekend, if a family outing of some sort needs to be quickly put together, it will do rightly.