The title sounds like a two-word pitch for the film in pidgin English. It is a laborious, sentimental drama featuring a self-parodic performance from Drew Barrymore, based on a TV news event that briefly gripped the US in 1988. Three gray whales were trapped by the ice in Barrow, Alaska; some homely, folksy people out there identified the crisis; some homely, folksy people elsewhere wanted to get involved; the White House press team belatedly saw the point and the military forces of the US and Soviet Union wound up pulling together in a glasnost-style mission to free these noble, vulnerable beasts. The movie plays like some uncynical, credulous version of Wag the Dog, in which we are all expected to get behind the sugary good-news story and endorse the good faith of the politicians and big-oil hombres who did their darnedest to set the whales free. There's even a solemn montage of families all over America gathered round their TV sets, transfixed by the story.

John Krasinski plays Adam Carlson, the clean-cut news reporter out there in Alaska, making firm friends with the indigenous people, hoping for a big career break. Ted Danson is the grumpy oil man, keen to drill in Alaska, but who sort of redeems himself, and Barrymore plays a Greenpeace activist, doggedly embarrassing the big corporations for despoiling the environment. And yet she's not entirely the good guy herself, insisting at first on a hotheaded denunciation of local Inuits for wanting to hunt whales. So apparently all sides are at fault. The whales themselves look like they are about to die of boredom.