Most critics are warm towards Free Willy, and they judge it on its own terms: a family film with a moral purpose that sets out to move its audience and largely does. The praise clusters around the bond between the boy and the orca, which reviewers find believable and affecting, and around the care the film takes in showing the daily business of looking after the animal. The score and the underwater photography come in for repeated mention, as does the blend of animatronics with footage of the real whale, Keiko.
The reservations are familiar ones. Several reviews call the plotting clichéd and the sentiment laid on thick; the Los Angeles Times notes strained turns in the story, and Radio Times finds the family scenes weak and the villains overdrawn. Nobody is hostile and the spread is narrow. Three of the eight reviews, including Roger Ebert’s and the New York Times’s, could only be partly read, so the picture rests on the five that could.