Movie Review - 'The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep'

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

Starring Alex Etel, Emily Watson, and Brian Cox
Directed by Jay Russell
Rated PG

Somewhere in the vast bunker of the Writers Guild of America, there are probably hundreds of never-produced screenplays about the Loch Ness Monster. Think about the possibilities of a giant, mythical/prehistoric beast haunting the gloomy Scottish highlands. But for some reason, the one that makes it to theaters this week is a dopey kids’ movie.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep does the unthinkable: It makes the Loch Ness Monster…cute.  At least that’s the way the story is told by an aging pub dweller (Brian Cox), who horns in on an American couple’s vacation to tell them the real story behind a very famous (and fraudulent) photo of Nessie.

The legend began in World War II, he tells them, as the contemporary movie slowly dissolves into the 1940s. Young Angus (Alex Etel) is playing on the beach one day and finds a curious looking rock. The rock turns out to be an egg, which hatches to reveal a baby monster. Ahh, how adorable.

As boy and monster become friends the story becomes more and more tiresome. The only relief is that at least some of the actors are worth their salt; Emily Watson, Ben Chaplin and Cox all mine a couple memorable moments and some believable gravitas in this messy, overly sentimental reinvention of one of the 20^th century’s great mysteries. It’s akin to David Fincher going a different route with Zodiac, spending a lot of time on how popular the alleged serial killer Arthur Leigh Allen might have been in high school.

Director Jay Russell knows how to yank on your heart strings. There’s not an animal lover alive who can make it all the way through his melodrama My Dog Skip without bawling, but with The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, the tears are for a completely different reason.