Close the book on ‘Inkheart’

— Since “Inkheart” purports to champion reading and the printed word, the best way to honor the film’s intentions would be to give kids a copy of the original book by Cornelia Funke. Actually seeing “Inkheart” would be enough to turn anyone off of not only literacy but also filmgoing.

This shrill, moronic and often ugly family adventure feels cobbled together from spare parts, with a script (David Lindsay-Abaire adapted Funke’s novel) that can’t even be bothered to follow its own rules or internal logic. Add an overblown score by Javier Navarrete — a left turn in traffic gets a fanfare usually reserved for invading Mongol hordes — and you have the recipe for an early contender for “Worst of 2009” lists.

Oatmeal-bland Brendan Fraser stars as Mortimer Folchart, who has the powers of a “silvertongue” — that is, he can bring people and objects out of books simply by reading those books aloud. Years earlier, his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) disappeared into a novel called “Inkheart” when Mortimer accidentally read several of the book’s characters out. (Early on, we’re told that if something comes from the book into the real world, then the opposite must take place as well. Until that notion is completely dropped.)

With his young daughter Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett), Mortimer has searched the globe for another copy of “Inkheart” in the hopes of rescuing his wife. Meanwhile, the book’s fire-breathing juggler Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) has been stalking Mortimer so that he can return to his own wife (Bettany’s real-life spouse Jennifer Connolly, in a cameo), while the villainous Capricorn (Andy Serkis) wants Mortimer to fetch him all the gold and treasure that literature has to offer.

There’s lots of frantic chasing going on, much of it involving poor Helen Mirren, stuck in the thankless role of Resa’s dotty, book-collecting aunt Elinor. (Yes, that’s two Oscar-winning actresses completely wasted in this mess.) Despite the fact that most of the film is set in the picturesque Italian countryside, Roger Pratt’s muddy cinematography gives “Inkheart” the overcast look of a low-budget “Mad Max” rip-off.

Brendan Fraser’s popularity as a leading man in this sort of off-brand adventure is a testament to his “first do no wrong” style of acting. It’s not that he does anything bad or good or inept or surprising or terrible or wonderful; he’s just a placeholder who stands back and lets the special effects do all the work. He’s not necessarily one of the problems in “Inkheart,” but he certainly doesn’t compensate for the many, many ways in which this movie goes terribly wrong.

I laughed exactly once in “Inkheart” — when a minor character thinks the frantic Mirren has stepped out of a copy of “The Madwoman of Chaillot” — but spent the rest of the time putting my fingers in my ears and rolling my eyes at the clumsy plot inconsistencies. Stay at home, read your own kids a great book, and spare yourself this nonsense.