THE WATER HORSE: LEGEND OF THE DEEP
Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

With no Narnia or Harry Potter tales to fulfill our burning need for (sort of) child-friendly entertainment this holiday season, we instead get the slightly safer though still mildly entertaining story of THE WATER HORSE, a clever spin of the story behind the Loch Ness Monster. The story begins in the present day in a bar with Brian Cox telling a pair of young American tourists traveling through Scotland about the story behind the famous photo of Nessie. The tale he spins begins during World War II, when all seafront parts of the UK were fearful of German U-boats sneaking up on their shores. Young Angus (Alex Etel, the younger brother from MILLIONS) finds a mysterious stone among the rocks near his beachfront home, where he lives with his sister and his mother (Emily Watson). His father had died in the war, but he doesn't know that because his mother can't bring herself to tell the kids. In the father's absence, Ben Chaplin's Lewis is brought in as a handyman. When the odd-looking stone turns out to be an oversized egg that hatches a small dinosaur-like creature, Angus does everything in his power to keep the little monster hidden from view while trying to keep the ravenous thing fed.

Eventually Angus finds he must confide in his sister and Lewis, who seems to think the creature (named Crusoe) is a water horse, a fabled creature so rare that only one of them can live on the earth at a time. As soon as one dies, the egg of another hatches (Lewis' explanation of how the water horse species reproduces is a bit awkward). When a group of British military show up at the family's doorstep with the intention of setting up a stronghold to protect the exposed lake from potential invaders, the job of hiding Crusoe (who seems to grow exponentially the more he eats) becomes more difficult. Director Jay Russell (LADDER 49; MY DOG SKIP) has essentially taken a boy-and-his-dog story (based on the book by Dick King-Smith) and applied it to this creature of fantasy.

I certainly didn't have any problems with the acting in THE WATER HORSE. I particularly liked Etel's performance, although his character is called upon to have a temper tantrum, run away and disappear so often, I got a little tired of it. Watson and Chaplin do the most with their characters, who are clearly meant to be in the early stages of falling in love. The film's bigger problems begin and end with the military aspect. David Morrissey as the captain in charge has a crush on Watson, and it's a plotline that seems to serve no other purpose than to drag the story out longer than it needs to be. I'm not a big fan of Morrissey to begin with (his starring roles in BASIC INSTINCT 2 and THE REAPING didn't exactly set my world on fire), but here he's supposed to be on the lookout for Germans, and instead he's courting this Scottish widow. The kids will love that. The special effects from Weta that bring Crusoe to life are not some of their best work, but the way that Angus and the creature interact when Crusoe gets to be too massive for the house and must be moved to the loch are impressive. In the end, THE WATER HORSE didn't charm me or fill me with a sense of wonder the way it was striving a little too hard to do. The quality of the acting made watching this movie a painless experience, but in the end, the film didn't win me over. That being said, kids will probably eat up some of the more slapstick elements of the film, as Crusoe is set loose in the house, knocking over everything he even comes near. He belches a lot, too. I think that sums up my feeling on the film better than anything I could say.

Capone

I want an inflatable WaterHorse Swimming Pool Toy!