The Day of the Dolphin

When you read a movie's description on a streaming service, and it talks about dolphins trained to assassinate the President, that sets up a certain expectation. When you see that it stars George C. Scott and is directed by Mike Nichols, who had directed The Graduate before this, you begin to wonder how your expectations and these realities will mesh. The answer is, they don't. At all. The Day Of The Dolphin should be crazy. It shouldn't just lean into the inherent insanity of the premise, it should fall ass-over-teakettle into it. This should be a movie that begs to be featured on RiffTrax. Instead, Nichols treats the movie with grave seriousness. This isn't about political assassin dolphins. It's about communication and love and humanity's interactions with other species. It takes an hour of this movie's hour-forty-five for the plot to kick in, and the assassination subplot is so under-developed, it starts and ends with all the conflict of picking a breakfast cereal at the grocery store. The supporting characters are so inconsequential, I'm not sure that half of them have names. And the hint of secret organizations watching other secret organizations is world-building this movie does not have the time for, nor has it earned in any way. The Day Of The Dolphin, inexplicably, wants to be a NatGeo humans-and-nature-coexisting story, until it decides to be a 70's political thriller, and it has no business being either one of them. Seeing Scott get teary as he tells a talking dolphin he loves it, and the dolphin says it back, is sweet, but it's so jarring and out of place with the expectations the premise sets up. Nothing about The Day Of The Dolphin works the way you'll want it to. A total misfire of a movie.