Rental Review: Eye of the Dolphin.

I love dolphins. Kids’ movies can be cool when they’re done right. So I rented this in hopes it would be pretty good. Apparently, I was wrong. Alyssa (Carly Schroeder) is a troubled teen after her mother gets killed in a boating accident and drowns. She ends up acting out in school (by making excellent grades, listening to her iPod, and smoking pot), which makes her get expelled. So her grandmother decides to let her know that her father, Dr. James Hawk (Adrian Dunbar), is still alive and working with dolphins in the Bahamas. They decide to go (right when her father is facing issues with/cancellation of his research), and end up meeting her father’s friends and partners, the father/daughter Daniel (George Harris) and Tamika (Christine Adams). Her father proceeds to be an awful father to her, while Daniel, Tamika, and the dolphins try to work together to ‘fix’ her.

So let’s start with the acting. Carly Schroeder, who you may or may not recognize as an all-grown-up version of the best friend of the little brother from the old Disney show Lizzie McGuire (did I lose you there?), gives anywhere from a bad to a so-so performance. The grandmother is just awful. In fact, to make this short, the only good thing to come from this movie acting-wise was the vastly underused George Harris, but that’s to be expected. I mean, the man is Kingsley Shacklebolt. Christine Adams isn’t too bad, either.

The script and the dialogue are horrible, as well. The story is so by-the-books that it’s ridiculous. The dialogue is stiff, cheesy, and just plain bad (and, as I said, the delivery doesn’t help much, either). There’s really not much more to say about the story. Some of the characters are just plain jerks when it is really unnecessary and just being done to help further plot.

The cinematography is basic stuff you might see in a TV movie… nothing special… like the rest of the movie. I’m really not sure what else I can say about this movie. And the ending is mind-boggling. Ignore if you care, but they spend the whole movie trying to make it so that the dolphins won't have to deal with tourists in their space and they can be free and be studied in peace. So what is the final resolution? Basically to create a Sea World-like environment where the dolphins can be studied in tiny cages in which tourists can hang in and around. Seriously. There was more of a scientific reasoning behind it, but call it what you might... it's still taking away the entire point. Might as well score it now.

The Zed Word

(By the way, if you're curious, the only reasons I scored it that high was due to random bikini scenes throughout, as well as George Harris' performance).