The road to freedom is travelled lightly in I Am David, a sincere but somewhat bland tale of a young lad's escape from a post-World War II labour camp. Short, simple and inoffensive, it's well suited to family viewing, albeit on the gogglebox one Sunday teatime rather than the big screen. Jim Caviezel puts in a pensive performance as a kindly fellow inmate, but The Passion Of The Christ star can't save this from being slight.

Caviezel's only seen in scattered flashbacks, due to the fact that the story opens with the eponymous hero's night-time flight from Belene Prison Camp in Bulgaria, 1952. It's the most gripping - and most cinematic - part of the film, but once David (Ben Tibber) has scrambled over the barbed-wire fence the tension tapers off. Attempts at revving it up again - a burning building, brief re-capture - don't really work, leaving the accent to fall on our hero's anodyne discovery that the world isn't such a bad place after all.

"SO LITTLE IN THE WAY OF REAL EMOTION"

First the boy's taken in by a warm Italian family and then by aged painter Joan Plowright, whose twinkly-eyed compassion gives David's journey a boost in its closing stretch. All the same, the film's problems remain: a lack of background detail (it's none too clear how David ended up in the camp, or who exactly the bad guys are); the creaky, platitude-heavy script ("If you're alive you can change things. If you're dead you can't"); and a rather droopy performance from newcomer Tibber.

It's a shame that such unremarkable fare should come from Paul Feig, who was behind the short-lived but superb teen TV series Freaks And Geeks. The best you can say for his directorial debut is that it goes relatively easy on the schmaltz - although the rushed reunion finale nearly puts paid to that. It's sad, though, that there's so little in the way of real emotion either.