This is a nice little film that the whole family can enjoy together. It will not deliver any surprises or stun you with Academy award performances. Just a simple story requiring a suspension of disbelief and, perhaps, an open heart.
Bindi Irwin delivers a good performance and it's too bad she didn't continue to make movies as her acting ability was strong even as a child.
The plot is standard family fare - good guys win, bad guys lose and protagonists learn valuable life lessons.
The CGI whale is pretty good by 2010 standards. The robo-whale, however, is pretty dreadful and totally unconvincing.
I agree with many reviewers that the title of the film should not have included the phrase "Free Willy". This film exists in a separate universe and has no connection to the other three films whatsoever.
It's somewhat amusing to hear from the "Free Willy" purists who hold those films in such high regard. They were not the high-concept, altruistic message films these people imagine them to be. Although the production values were higher, all those films were implausible and predictable. The addition of a environmental blurb on the end credits does not raise the integrity of the film.
To those who feel this movie disrespects Keiko all I can say that the orca was exploited from the moment he was captured at about two years of age. He lived a miserable existence in concrete prisons where he was chronically ill from a variety of infections. Warner Brothers exploited him for the movies and even his disastrous release was hyped like a circus sideshow. For all its flaws, "Escape from Pirate's Cove" didn't exploit and harm a living orca.
