Review: Dolphin Tale
I have really mixed feelings about Dolphin Tale, which opens today in Austin theaters. On the one hand, it's relatively entertaining, has a couple of nice messages at its core, and it has some great actors in it. On the other hand, it is tailored and finessed within an inch of its life to win the affections of the audience. It does so by delivering trite-and-not-too-serious conflict, a fat handful of plot threads that weave together into a tidy narrative, and a deluge of boy-on-dolphin underwater footage that could easily be repurposed into a mesmerizing screensaver. Not that anyone but your local office products store has screensavers anymore, but you know what I mean.
To describe the plot fully would require several paragraphs and a score card. I'm pretty sure my 5-year-old daughter didn't catch all of it, but she waited patiently for the grownups to stop talking so the movie could get back to the kids and dolphins.
It boils down to this: Sawyer (Nathan Gamble) has trouble focusing at school, what with his daddy-abandonment issues and his college-aged cousin headed for a tour in the Middle East. Plans to catch up on his studies in summer school go awry when he finds himself rescuing a beached dolphin (eventually named Winter) and becomes The Only Person Who Can Inspire In It The Will To Live as it convalesces at the local aquarium.
The cast fills out with not one but two wrinkly voices of wisdom (Morgan Freeman and Kris Kristofferson), hot middle-aged mom Ashley Judd, aquarium brat Hazel (the adorable Cozi Zuehlsdorff, who is the best thing about the movie), and her dad Dr. Haskett (Harry Connick, Jr.), who is trying to save the dolphin and the down-on-its-luck aquarium at the same time.
I feel compelled to mention Ray McKinnon, possibly the most talented actor on set. (No disrespect to Morgan Freeman, but he's kind of on autopilot here.) In Dolphin Tale, McKinnon is relegated to the underwritten part of a scruffy summer-school teacher who suffers comic abuse at the beak of the film's running gag, a pelican who lives at the aquarium. By all means, Hollywood -- keep paying Ray's bills. I would rather he find work in movies like this than not find work at all. But give him a few more parts with dignity, will ya?
Rant ends.
No points will be awarded for guessing that Sawyer and the Dolphin will save (in no particular order): each other, the money-troubled aquarium, Sawyer's academic future, the morale of Sawyer's cousin, Sawyer's relationship with his mom and Haskett's faith in himself. I do wonder if the film's tacked-on "amputees are people too" message will be met positively by that community, but as Winter (whom you can see at seewinter.com) has apparently interacted with human amputees in the real world, Dolphin Tale's creators could hardly have left out some acknowledgement of the connection.
My litmus test for any kids' movie is whether it entertains the adult members of its audience while keeping kids engaged. On that level I suppose Dolphin Tale succeeds -- it doesn't insult the intelligence of the kids watching and there's plenty of pretty stuff to watch. I just wish it weren't so contrived. As every wrinkle in the plot unfolded an each new character was introduced, I was highly aware of the fact that I was watching a movie, and that these were actors saying ridiculous things that real people don't say. I also felt the impact of a few disposable scenes as the film dragged in the middle and a highly plot-convenient hurricane caught the aquarium with its pants down. (Seriously – everyone in Clearwater, FL knows when a hurricane is on its way. That an aquarium would have to scramble to batten down the hatches is beyond ridiculous.)
I really wanted to enjoy Dolphin Tale as much as my daughter did. Where she saw a pretty picture of a dolphin, however, I saw a jigsaw puzzle where no matter how perfectly each piece fell into place, I could still notice the lines between them.
As a counterpoint, you can hear what Elizabeth thought of the movie, including some mild spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing.