Executive producers, Richard Donner, Arnon Milchan, Jim Van Wyck. Produced by Lauren Shuler-Donner, Jennie Lew Tugend. release in association with Le Studio Canal Plus, Regency Enterprises and Alcor Films of a Shuler-Donner/Donner production. Its most serious misstep is when Michael Jackson’s theme song stops the action to focus on inane images.Ī Warner Bros. Handsomely produced and politically correct, “Free Willy 2” avoids stumping for environmental concerns or family values.
The mechanical whales rarely betray their wire-and-mesh origins and remain secondary to the film’s human elements. Technical credits are clean and crisp without being cold. And when the high energy finale kicks in, emotions run high and culminate in a charged wrap-up. Schellenberg and Madsen are masters of underplaying their matter-of-fact attitude makes palatable and credible what would otherwise be improbable, melodramatic material. But he’s real and confident, and that adds up to an attractive combination. Richter is an unusual young lead in that he’s not unduly charismatic nor classically handsome. Certainly the ensemble cast contributes to steering the material away from the mire of sentimentality. It ought to be a breathless mess, and it’s difficult to say precisely why it isn’t. Family trauma is juxtaposed with physical peril, echoes of Jesse’s troubled youth reverberate in Elvis’ life and Native American folklore clashes with industrial expedience. The script, credited to Karen Janszen, Corey Blechman and John Mattson (Blechman co-wrote the original), is nothing if not ambitious. Director Dwight Little may be a tad awkward in his form, but he does manage to keep all the balls in the air.
The movie is less a narrative arc than it is a juggling act. This review appeared in the Daily Republic, Fairfield, CA.Add to all this personal angst an oil tanker gone aground and bleeding into the whale lanes off Washington state and you have “Free Willy 2” in a tightly packed nutshell. The film's weaknesses are not something that will bother the kiddie target-audience, but there are several places at which adults will roll their eyes, like the obligatory Michael Jackson theme song scene, which is thrown haphazardly into the middle of the movie, killing what little sense of flow the movie still had.
The cute dialogue and the photography are the strongest parts of "Free Willy 2," including the expected whale watching footage and a scene, shot from below, of the whales escaping underwater while oil burns on the surface. Subsequently Jesse signals Willy to do the stunts you'll see in the commercials to help the whales escape. The bad oil company men make a deal with some bad marine park men to save the whales from the slick and put them in captivity. The movie's continuity problems come when the screenwriter seems to suddenly realize there isn't any conflict, and essential element to any feel-good movie, and decides arbitrarily to crash an oil tanker and trap Willy and his siblings in an oil slick. The two brothers don't much care for each other at first, and smart aleck dialogue between them is one of the better elements of "Free Willy 2." When Jesse is not playing with Willy in a cove where the whales go to relax or enlisting Willy's help in impressing a girl he's met, he is trading barbs with Elvis. The movie opens with a teenage Jesse (Jason James Richter) discovering that the mother who abandon him has died and left his 8-year-old half-brother, Elvis (Francis Capra), with nowhere to live.Įlvis joins Jesse and his foster family on vacation on the Oregon coast where, it turns out, Willy has migrated for the summer with his reunited family as well. Starring Jason James Richter, Francis CapraĪs painful as it is to use a movie review cliche, it must be said that "Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home" is a feel-good film.ĭespite a catalog of continuity problems - the editing is so sloppy at times you expect to see "meanwhile in another movie" flash across the screen - the story, reuniting Jesse the heroic orphan boy and Willy the put-upon performing whale, has enough heart get a small smile out of even those who go in with their kids expecting to suffer through it.