A strange “Jonah and the Whale” concept that’s even stranger in execution. It’s got incredible talent too, but none of that can save this cinematic miscue from submerging in banal blubbering. It’s essentially a one trick pony — make that “a one bubble guppy”—that lacks character development or even a plot. The film’s lone benefit is that it will likely inspire a brief online biology session for viewers using their smart phones to search on “whale digestion.”
The hook to this whale’s tale is flounder flat. Family patriarch Mitt (Josh Brolin) runs a sight-seeing boat tour company near Monterey Bay, but has terminal mesothelioma. He straps on his diving weights and jumps into the cold waters sans diving tank. The death (though the body’s not been retrieved) and pending funeral proceedings beckons home Mitt’s estranged son Jay (Austin Abrams, recently on screen in the raucous “Resident Evil” reboot) from college in Iowa. Driven by a sense of guilt, Jay gets up in the early hours of the morning one day and decides to look for dear old dad’s body. Combing through a kelp garden, Jay gets caught up in a fracas between a giant squid and a sperm whale. Both he and the squid wind up in the belly of the whale, and the cuttlefish proves to be one angry co-survivor.
The rest of the film is pretty much Jay trying to reason his way out of the whale’s colon before his oxygen runs out (the air cavity inside the whale is toxic). What that amounts to is Jay mumbling to himself through his respirator about what he needs to do and why as the whale burps, belches and farts. This awkward connection seems to be a method to keep the audience clued in.
Thankfully, it’s all intercut with flashbacks to moments with his tough love dad: conflicts about attending college elsewhere, leisure time with friends and man’s relationship with the sea. The two play off each other well. In one scene, they come to blows, just as they did in “Weapons” last year, though that was a much higher concept helmed by a filmmaker (Zack Cregger) looking to make a statement. Here, director Brian Duffield (“Spontaneous,” “No One Will Save You”) is just connecting the dots. Working from the 2023 Daniel Kraus novel of the same title (Duffield and Kraus share the script credit), the film lacks tension and credibility. Worse, Frankie the Fish from the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish commercial might be more convincing than the movie’s undersea and whale FX.
You might wonder whether the movie was inspired by the bizarre 2021 encounter off Provincetown, where scuba diver Michael Packard was swallowed whole by a humpback whale and spit out seconds later. That is not the source for Kraus’s novel. Rather, it emerged from a 2020 report of kayakers in California being briefly snared in a whale’s mouth.
Packard’s ordeal was made into the 2023 documentary “In the Whale: The Greatest Fish Story Ever Told,” directed by Boston Globe journalist David Abel. Kraus’s title refers to boon the corpse of a whale offers its oceanic ecosystem when it dies and sinks to the bottom of the sea. That would have made for a better movie than this lackluster chum.
Playing at Apple Cinemas Cambridge and AMC Assembly Row 12.
A stronger
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