A beautifully filmed, child-centered re-invention of the Loch Ness Monster legend, this Scottish tale has the potential to be truly enchanting. Alas,The Water Horse rolls along in the treads of every funny-animal movie before it. You can practically tick off the milestones: kid finds strange egg. Kid keeps newly hatched creature in bathtub, unbeknownst to parent. Creature wreaks havoc. Bad Grown-Ups try to hurt creature. Good Grown-Ups don't believe creature is real. Creature, under threat, performs a Heroic Deed. Broken family learns to love again. Creature and kid have tearful goodbye.
Obviously this kind of narrative strikes a chord with audiences — otherwise, why repeat it religiously with extra-terrestrials (ET), whales (Free Willy), dogs (Beethoven), robots (Short Circuit) and otters (Ring of Bright Water)? But the predictability is tiresome for adults who've sat through it all before.
The young boys at my screening did say they enjoyed Water Horse, despite some intense scenes of kid-and-sea-monster endangerment. But I couldn't help noticing that they asked their mom an awful lot of questions about Nessie, questions like: "Where did it come from?" and "How does it understand what the boy is saying?" A film that actually tried to answer these questions, rather than sticking to the standard formula, would have been much more rewarding. — Gwynne Watkins
