Entertainment

This beached tale leaves you ‘Surf’ bored

You’d think it would be hard to make an uninteresting movie based on the true story of Bethany Hamilton, a teenager who bravely resumed competing as a surfer after losing her left arm in a 2003 shark attack off the Hawaiian island of Kauai. But the terminally bland “Soul Surfer” comes perilously close.

Shamelessly pandering to the elusive Christian family audience, a committee of 18 producers and seven writers has removed nearly every trace of grit from this airbrushed portrait.

In pursuit of a PG rating, even the shark attack isn’t especially scary, in what could well have been a cross between “Jaws” and “127 Hours” in different hands.

As colorlessly directed by Sean McNamara (the Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven”), the movie’s protagonist, Bethany (AnnaSophia Robb of Disney’s “The Bridge to Terabithia”), is largely personality-free, both before and after the attack. Even when asking “How can this be God’s plan for me?”

A scene where she rejects a prosthetic arm proffered by “Inside Edition” is especially awkward, and not just because her family seems far too well-off to require such assistance. When a mean girl in Bethany’s first surfing competition pushes our one-armed heroine off her board, it comes off as phony, a shameless manipulation of the audience.

A frustrated Bethany gives up surfing, at least until she joins her supportive best friend (Lorraine Nicholson) on a trip to Thailand to help victims of the 2004 tsunami. Luring the natives back into the water with the encouragement of a Sunday school teacher (a treacly Carrie Underwood of “American Idol” fame, wearing a ton of eye makeup), Bethany decides to go back to competitive surfing — where she faces the same mean girl at the national finals.

Helen Hunt, seldom seen on the big screen these days, lends some gravitas as Bethany’s concerned mother. Dennis Quaid largely phones it in as her hard-driving father, who owns a huge beachfront estate in Hawaii without seeming to hold down any kind of job.

I wouldn’t be dwelling on this stuff if “Soul Surfer” managed to be more involving. As it is, the most notable contribution here may be the gorgeous aquatic cinematography by the veteran John Leonetti, coming right off . . . “Piranha 3-D.”