Cute kids, an even cuter baby whale, Beau Bridges as a get-rich-quick scheme-loving grandpa and a breathtaking South African setting? They all add up to a fun, and in some parts moving, family-friendly adventure in Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove. And yes, I started sniffling a few times. A baby whale’s in jeopardy, come on!
Believe it or not, Willy needs freeing again. Actually, while Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove is the fourth (!) film in the Free Willy franchise, it’s the first that’s not connected in any way to the movies that preceded it. Except that it still revolves around a baby whale named Willy that needs to be freed, of course.
This time, the action takes place in South Africa, where young Kirra (played by Bindi Irwin, the late Steve Irwin’s daughter) is sent to spend the summer after her father is injured back in Australia. She’s not too happy about being stuck with her eccentric grandpa Gus (Beau Bridges), and his priorities are so messed up that he chooses to finish a poker game rather than come pick her up from the airport when she first arrives. Needless to say, their relationship is rocky at the outset. And we viewers quickly learn that Gus is always on the lookout for a way to make an easy buck.
But Gus does try his best to win Kirra over, and takes her to the local amusement park, Pirate’s Lair, hoping to impress her. Their visit is interrupted, however, by an intense storm, which ends up separating a young whale from the rest of his pod. The whale, which Kirra decides to name “Willy” when she finds him stuck in the lagoon at the amusement park the next morning, has not yet developed his “echolocation” abilities. Meaning that if he’s simply lifted over the cove’s rock wall and released back into the ocean, he will not be able to reunite with his family and will most likely starve.
Gus takes this as an opportunity to start making money off of the cute creature. Soon, “Willy” shirts and merchandise are everywhere and business is booming for Kirra’s grandpop. But then a shady character from a rival amusement park (you didn’t know amusement park owners had rivals, did you?) develops a scheme to make Willy sick, so that Gus will sell him off on the cheap.
You know how everything’s going to turn out, but your kids are likely to be enthralled by the battle to keep Willy out of the hands of evildoers and help him return to his pod.
I was definitely worried about whether Irwin would be able to pull off her role without being a bit too precious for my taste. There are few child actors I can tolerate. Thankfully, Irwin’s acting got stronger as the film went along — it’s almost as if we were watching her improve her craft. At the beginning she was pretty stiff and forced, but then came into her own and seemed like a natural. It probably helped that the role wasn’t too much of a stretch from playing herself on Bindi the Jungle Girl (for which she became the youngest person ever to win a Daytime Emmy). Beau Bridges was having a grand ol’ time as well, and the tenuous relationship between Gus and Kirra was very believable.
For being a direct-to-DVD film, the overall quality of Free Willy 4 is extremely high. It doesn’t look or feel like a film that couldn’t have been in theaters. The South African setting is a character unto itself, and the scenes of the whale pod swimming through the ocean are gorgeous. But make no mistake, this is a children’s film. The “lessons” are in-your-face, the cutesy-ness is overwhelming in parts, and there is absolutely nothing unpredictable about the storyline. So this isn’t a disc I’d recommend renting to those without some youngsters at home. My three-star rating is meant to be a relative gauge against other family-friendly films in this genre, and in that realm Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove is quite an enjoyable ride.
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Posted on April 26, 2010 at 5:00 pm
My 8 yr old daughter and I watched twice. Guess she loved it! She enjoyes these kind of movies where kids are involved.
I thought it was an enjoyable movie and thought Bindi Erwin was a good sctress and was surprised by that. I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was.