ROUGHLY what “Ro mancing the Stone” would have been like as a 1970s Disney flick had CGI been available, “Nim’s Island” is strictly for the 8-and-under crowd.
Jodie Foster, who actually worked for Disney in the ’70s, plays Alexandra, an agoraphobic novelist who reluctantly ventures forth from her San Francisco apartment.
She’s received a plea for help from Nim, a young fan on a remote South Seas island who somehow has access to a broadband connection.
Nim’s widowed oceanographer father has disappeared in a storm. She doesn’t realize, however, that Alex, the dashing hero of Alexandra’s books, and the author are hardly one and the same.
Foster indulges in slapstick for the first time in many years – all this while Alexandra trades mild insults with fictional alter ego Alex, played by Gerard Butler in a style that might generously be described as cartoonish.
The “300” star has a dual role, also appearing as Nim’s ever-resourceful, temporarily stranded father. But you have to wonder why, if a pet pelican is smart enough to fetch his tool belt, why can’t the same pelican bring back a message to his worried daughter?
Breslin’s almost-as-resourceful Nim fortunately doesn’t ham it up as much as the adults, even when she has to cope with a monsoon, a volcanic eruption and, most frighteningly, an invasion of her island paradise by a pirate-themed Australian cruise ship.
Maybe it’s the cheesy special effects, but it can’t have been easy to make a movie shot on Australia’s Gold Coast look like it was filmed on Catalina Island and the Disney back lot. Even the animals look phony.
Credit husband-and-wife co-directors Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett (of the dimly recalled “Little Manhattan”), who also adapted an “acclaimed” children’s book by Wendy Orr.
I walked out of “Nim’s Island” with one burning question: How much of the budget was provided by Progresso soup and Purell hand sanitizer, both of which receive the most extended product placement in any film released so far this year? In addition to several loving close-ups, Foster mentions both products in dialogue.