It’s been a while since the rescue of a whale was the focus of a film. Kirk and Spock did it in Star Trek IV and of course there was Free Willy. Now Universal is ready to shove John Krasinski and Drew Barrymore into the water for Whales, a fact-based family film about three California grey whales trapped under Arctic Circle ice in 1988.
Barrymore signed up back in February to play a Greenpeace activist who struggles to help the stranded creatures, and now Krasinski is aboard as a small town newspaper hack who helped break the story and ultimately turned the cause into an international story which even spread as far as US president Roland Reagan and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, as the Cold War enemies found a common cause in the mammals’ plight.
What worries us is the prospect of Ken Kwapis behind the camera: while he earned plenty of credit and trust shooting episodes of The Office, he also blew most of that making the awful License To Wed, with Krasinski as one of the leads.
Still, as long as Robin Williams doesn’t play one of the whales, we should be safer this time. And it’ll shoot in the fall, assuming Krasinski can find space in his busy TV schedule.