Full of blubbery goodness

FREE WILLY 2 Dwight Little (U) THE BIG SLEEP Howard Hawks (PG)

Like its predecessor, the boy-befriends-killer-whale adventure Free Willy 2 is wholesome and soft-hearted, painted in rich sunset caramels and golds and deep ocean blues on a widescreen canvas that stretches to the edges of your field of vision. A chunky Basil Poledouris score swells so heavily you expect to hear something snap; whales perform impromptu acrobatic displays as dewy-eyed scamps with troubled backgrounds look on or, in the case of our hero Jesse (Jason James Richter), hang on (we've come a long way since Jim'll Fix It: now the kids show the grown-ups how to ride sea mammals). In the distance, an oil tanker looms, ripe for spillage.

It's only been a year since Free Willy, but the picture has already taken a short-cut into the collective movie-going consciousness in a way that only Disney films are normally permitted to do. The sequel is roughly half as good. Jesse has grown a lot in the intervening year, so too much space is given to his pubescent yearnings; the tricks he performs with Willy now suggest a young buck revving his Escort to impress the gals. Other developments are more successful. Jesse's half-brother Elvis (Francis Capra) is on the scene now, scrambling for affection and attention in a way that all but first-borns will recognise. Michael Madsen is back as Jesse's foster dad, and though casting an actor most famous for playing a cop-torturing psycho may have seemed incongruous first time around, it has a plausible sting: you're wary of him and his temper, the way you were of your own father's.

Free Willy 2 doesn't have the frantic race against time that ended the first film either, though its shades of ecological concern are thankfully made palatable enough for your most Power Rangers-crazed offspring. But next time out, how about a Michael Jackson-less soundtrack? "Childhood", the cloying theme-song ("No one understands me..."), makes you want to do something really nasty, like gorge yourself on whale meat. And that can't have been the intention.

A chance this week to marvel at Howard Hawks's 1946 thriller The Big Sleep, reissued in a sharp new 35mm print. Written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, after Chandler's novel, the words pop like cherry bombs in the mouths of Bogart and Bacall, creating enough sparks to obscure a plot that, even after three viewings, can still seem about as clear as hieroglyphics. No matter. Keep a keen ear on that crackling dialogue - it's less a screenplay than a freshly culled hog roasting on an open spit. "I liked that," Bacall purrs as she and Bogart break from a clinch. "I'd like more." Me, too.

n On release from Friday