This turnabout comes, strangely enough, while he is working off his punishment at the amusement park. Nobody can reach Jesse, least of all his new 'jailers,' and if something doesn't turn him around soon, he may simply fall between the cracks of the system and become a kind of real-life 'lost boy.' But since his back is against the wall, he decides to shack up with these new folks, at least until he can bust out and find his real mom, who, he keeps hoping, will someday rescue him from all these deadbeats and squares (i.e., grown-ups).īy presenting Jesse as a genuine malcontent - surly, uncooperative and filled with resentment - the filmmakers have provided us with the kind of emotional tension that is all too rare in films of this type. Plus he has to clean up the mess he made at the park. One night, after he gets nabbed by the police for a graffiti raid on the whale tank at Northwest Adventure, a Seattle amusement park, he is told that he can either go to juvenile hall or move in with Glen and Annie (Michael Madsen and Jayne Atkinson), his new foster parents.īoth choices make him want to puke. The hero, for example, isn't an apple-cheeked angel his name is Jesse (Jason James Richter), and at the beginning of the film he's a street kid, abandoned by his mother, panhandling for spare change, raiding restaurants or knocking off catering trucks for food with his urchin comrades.

'Free Willy' is set in the complex, sometimes baffling world that we recognize from our own lives.

Walker and Corey Blechman, the film has its own beguiling giant - in this case, a 7,000-pound orca whale named Willy - and its share of thrills, close calls and just enough uplift to meet the requirements of the genre.

Directed by Simon Wincer from a script by Keith A. In this dino-obsessed summer, 'Free Willy' is for my money the kids' movie of the season.

The making of free willy 2