The movie is nominally about Adam and Rachel, but the most interesting thing about Big Miracle is how it shows disparate groups coming together to address the trapped-whale problem: Rachel represents the activists; Adam and the ambitious Jill Jerard (Kristen Bell) lead the many reporters; Ted Danson plays an oil magnate whose wife goads him into helping as a PR mission; Adam is friends with Nathan (Ahmaogak Sweeney), a native Alaskan boy; and eventually the National Guard is drawn in, led by Colonel Tom Carroll (Dermot Mulroney). The movie is surprisingly honest about the myriad motivations at play, and when it makes detours to fill in the smaller stories and processes within the larger rescue operation, it feels, however briefly, like a message-y, family-friendly version of a Robert Altman ensemble movie.

The rest of the time, it pretty much resembles a message-y family-friendly movie about saving some whales, which obviously isn't the worst thing in the world. For the most part, Big Miracle resists the obvious temptation to humanize the whales, save for a few teary speeches from Barrymore insisting that they're just like us due to their remarkably humanlike quality of needing help. Apart from those stretches, the movie wisely focuses more on the people who care for these creatures, engineering human-whale contact moments more for the awe factor than the awwww factor.

But despite the many human sides to this story, the actors don't have much to do; Krasinski just cleans up his low-key charmer act, which somewhat diminishes said charm without the deadpan sarcasm of his Office character. Barrymore's unsteady earnestness makes sense for an environmental activist, but Rachel is written to de-emphasize Barrymore's sunniness and good humor; frankly, she's a little whiny (not to mention ill-defined in terms of her place in Greenpeace). This makes the relationship between Adam and Rachel a bit of a slog; it's supposed to be a sweetly traditional arc of proverbial remarriage, but the movie doesn't offer much beyond making sure we know that they are both really, really nice people.

Frankly, Kristen Bell's Jill seems plenty nice, too; a little mercenary, perhaps, but less so than any number of real-life reporters. Bell's likability proves no match for the screenplay's demands, however, which dictate that Adam must be faced with a choice between rekindled good feelings for Rachel and his wretched, misguided attraction to Jill and the soulless professional success she represents. It's not played out so vehemently, of course, but it's present enough to count as underdeveloped.

Still, even the movie's offenses are on the light side. Given the gulf between the hilarious sitcom scripts Kwapis has directed for television and the paradoxically sitcommier fare he puts into movie theaters, it's probably fine that this story (from the screenwriting pair responsible for more big-screen sitcoms like The Prince & Me) requires nothing more than the mildest of faint amusement, and some empathy for those poor whales (not least because they must, as they did in real life, endure nicknames derived from The Flintstones). This is a good-hearted movie, even if it's not all that good.