Though a bit sluggish for its target demographic -- adolescent girls -- this wholesome family entertainment does feature a cast of sure-fire audience pleasers: dolphins.
Fourteen-year-old Alyssa is a smart but troubled junior high-school girl who's dealing with her mother's recent drowning death in a fairly typical teenage fashion: She's skipping class, smoking pot in the girls' room and using her iPod to shut out the rest of the world. Alyssa never knew her father so she's now living with her grandmother, Lucy (Katharine Ross). After her wayward granddaughter is suspended for the third and possibly last time, Lucy figures it's time for drastic measures, and begins by dropping a bombshell: Alyssa's father wasn't the one-night stand in the Florida Keys Alyssa's mother made him out to be, but a man with whom she'd been in a relationship with for three years, and who never knew she'd become pregnant. Then, while Alyssa is still reeling, Lucy tells her that they're heading down to the Bahamas where her father, Dr. James Hawk (Adrian Dunbar), now works with dolphins, collecting data in an attempt to describe exactly how it is these highly evolved sea mammals communicate. Alyssa, it turns out, is a chip off the old block. Dr. Hawk, who lives with his much younger girlfriend, Tamika (Christine Adams), is just as irascible and rebellious and his daughter, drinking too much, scaring away the tourists who swim with the dolphins and interfere with his research, and refusing to bend to pressures from the town council to allow his two research subjects -- two dolphins named Bogey and Bacall -- become part of a money-making exhibition. Neither Alyssa nor Hawk is particularly thrilled to be suddenly thrust into each other's lives, but Alyssa soon warms up to island life, the dolphins and, eventually, Hawk. But just as they begin to come to terms with each other, Hawk's research is threatened by an intrusive consultant (Jane Lynch) who considers the work he's been doing "third-rate, junk science," and intends on shutting down his research facility and turn the dolphins into a lucrative tourist attraction.
The outcome depends on Alyssa's ability to communicate with dolphins, a skill that somehow proves her father's research and bridges the gap between them both, but comes a little too late in the film to feel entirely convincing. Kids will appreciate the dolphins, but adults will probably find the film's themes a bit heavy-handed and characterization a little too direct. When a dolphin swims off after briefly allowing Alyssa to rub its snout, she unloads on the fishy mammal. "Fine! Go ahead and leave me like everyone else!" Talk about needy. leave a comment --Ken Fox
