Winter the dolphin gamely plays herself in this loose re-telling of her fight for survival after a crab trap mangles her tail. Yet her "tale" also suffers damage, as director Charles Martin Smith surrounds the plucky bottlenose with a bunch of people in need of metaphorical healing. At the center of the poolside action are Sawyer (Nathan Gamble), a lonely boy whose swim champ cousin is deployed to the Middle East (you can almost hear the IED ticking), the widowed marine biologist overseeing the rehab effort (Harry Connick Jr.), and his chatterbox daughter (Cozi Zuehlsdorff). But aside from the charismatic Winter and Morgan Freeman as the prosthetics expert tasked with engineering her new tail, none of the characters makes much of a splash, and the weight of the forced and predictable subplots sinks the central story. Winter may be a moving symbol of resiliency, but Smith's film unfortunately sticks to shallow waters.
