Trust fund baby Jason Stevens (Drew Fuller) is a first-class ingrate. You know it from the moment he enters the “The Ultimate Gift,” roaring into the cemetery in his sports car just as his grandfather is being lowered into the ground. He asks, annoyed, why he has been summoned.

Jason is wearing designer sunglasses and a scarf knotted in the European fashion. He is smoking a cigarette (Gauloise?). What will it take to turn this sneering affront to the classic American values on which his family’s oil fortune was built into a decent young man?

It turns out his late grandfather has bequeathed a prescription: a quick dose of manual labor and financial hardship, an osmotic regime of earnest lectures, and a reward of untold millions beckoning at the end of the rainbow. Where there’s a will such as this, there must be a way. But presumably the screenwriters — Cheryl McKay adapted the script from a book by Jim Stovall — disagreed, because they added a cute little girl with leukemia to seal the deal.

Her name is Emily, and she is played by Abigail Breslin, the 11-year-old actress who earned an Oscar nomination for her winsome, potbellied turn in “Little Miss Sunshine.” Her character here, a more conventional creature, befriends Jason and guides him toward salvation. Emily is made of pure schmaltz and is a bit too smart for her own good, but Ms. Breslin makes her slightly unpredictable, and she is the only real spark of wit or energy in Michael O. Sajbel’s dull redemption fable.

The film’s title refers to Jason’s inheritance, for which his grandfather, Red, has decided to make him work. Red (James Garner) was a benevolent oil scion with a fondness for flannel shirts and, in the words of the greedy descendants he sagely cut out of his will, “cornpone wisdom.” On a DVD left for Jason, Red dishes out heaps of it, explaining along the way the steps Jason must take in order to claim the family fortune.

Red wants Jason to come around to the Christian values that have eluded the Stevens family. The old patriarch was apparently too busy to impart these values to them in his lifetime. Now here’s an interesting dilemma: Is the Protestant work ethic self-defeating? Unfortunately, the film is too concerned about staying on-message to mull it over. It dwells instead on Jason’s not-exactly-Herculean trials and his growing affection for Emily (and her cute mother), paving the way to a conclusion that feels awfully predetermined for a story about the challenge of finding a purpose in life — and for your bank account.

For his first task, Jason is put to work on a Texas ranch. The owner, an old friend of his grandfather’s named Gus, is played with low-key charm by Brian Dennehy, who appears all too briefly. Initially Jason refuses, but he grudgingly starts planting fence posts and even begins to feel a hint of satisfaction. Red’s will, however, stipulates just one month of hard labor, so Jason is sent home early and Gus has his Mexican staff finish the job. Red might actually be sending his grandson the wrong message with this one. But who am I to say? The old guy works in mysterious ways.

Jason must also learn what it’s like to be poor, so his car and apartment are confiscated and his credit cards are cancelled. It is during this homeless phase that he meets Emily, and after some adventures with the girl and her mother, he discovers she has cancer, and, more surprisingly, that he cares. After a quick, almost surreptitious chat about Jesus, Jason uses an advance on his inheritance to pay for Emily’s treatment. Somewhere around this point, he flies to Ecuador and gets abducted by drug traffickers.

The plot struggles to justify the wild detour; my hunch is that it’s a coded reference to the missionary adventure, not unlike the one dramatized in “End of the Spear,” a film distributed, like this one, by Fox-Faith, a new branch of 20th Century Fox devoted to films with “overt” Christian content. “The Ultimate Gift,” however, like Mr. Sajbel’s last film, “One Night With the King” — which told the story of Esther, the Jewish queen of Persia — isn’t explicitly about religion.

Both, however, feel like Sunday school lessons. In this film philanthropy is being preached, for almost two hours, on the assumption that the audience can afford it. “The Ultimate Gift” is not so much a movie as a teaching tool. And it really is about money after all.