Teenage Alyssa is taken to live with her estranged father in the Bahamas, where she discovers a gift for communicating with dolphins. But when her father's dolphin research facility is threatened, the girl and her cetacean friend hold the key.
There's a pleasantly dreamy quality to much of Eye of the Dolphin, and that goes a long way toward enabling audiences to ignore the formulaic plot and enjoy the laid-back charms of this innocuous indie.
There's real heart to be found in the story but it comes along with borderline saccharine sentimentality, a too facile ending, and clean outcomes that aren't earned.
As Eye of the Dolphin makes some jarringly contrived plot twists, a viewer can imagine writer/director/executive producer Michael Sellers listing his assets and pondering how to combine them for one movie.
Eye of the Dolphin is much better than most films of this sort, and if it helps a generation of young girls want to grow up to swim with live dolphins rather than groom My Little Ponys, that's certainly not a bad thing at all.
There are too many fishy family crises and too few fishlike mammals in this earnest 'Flipper' update, which soft-pedals its New Age agenda until a climactic speech that promises we can learn from our dolphin pals 'not just intellectually but spiritually.'
Carly Schroeder is strong and the film's genuineness compensates for the 'after school special'-style script and production values, making it a pleasant, even uplifting film.
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