Foster is painfully unfit for 'Nim's Island' role

The film version of the popular kid-lit novel "Nim's Island" makes a harmless enough preteen fantasy/adventure and a fair vehicle for reigning child star Abigail Breslin. Here she plays a girl growing up on an island paradise surrounded by cute animals.

But such an air of dumbness hovers over the movie, and it's all played so broadly that nothing about it is remotely believable. Its script is so flabby and lazy that it has no bite whatsoever as a family survival saga and it's just not much fun for anyone over 4 feet tall.

The title character, Nim, is an 11-year-old who lives with her marine biologist father (Gerard Butler) on a high Pacific island that somehow, in this age of satellites and Google Earth, has escaped discovery by the rest of the world, even though it's about the size of Maui.

Nim's joy is reading adventure novels about an Indiana Jones-like character named Alex Rover, which are written by an agoraphobic San Francisco author (Jodie Foster).

As smart as she is, Nim has deluded herself with the idea that the author IS the character.

So when her father is lost at sea in a typhoon and she's left alone on their island, she e-mails the neurotic writer, who, of course, drops everything and overcomes her numerous fears to journey to the end of the world and help Nim.

Both Breslin and Butler (who also plays the novels' Alex Rover character in fantasy sequences) have charm, and they -- along with the computer-enhanced animals -- occasionally rise above the uninspired direction and endless incredulities to give the movie its smattering of enjoyable moments.

But Foster's appearance is flat-out disastrous. She has little gift for the kind of slapstick clumsiness the script requires, and her multiphobic, obsessive-compulsive character is so relentlessly annoying every scene she's in plays like fingernails on a blackboard.