Say this for director Ken Kwapis: he must know how to make actors comfortable. He's directed great episodes of some of the best TV shows ever made, including Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Larry Sanders Show, while cultivating a side career making inferior big-screen vehicles for small-screen stars like Jason Alexander (Dunston Checks In), Fran Drescher (The Beautician and the Beast), and every young female on network TV in 2005 (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Big Miracle is his second feature starring his Office-mate John Krasinski. That Krasinski came bounding back after their previous collaboration, License to Wed, which in addition to being terrible failed to boost the careers of anyone involved, must speak to Kwapis's professionalism, friendliness, and excellent work helming a dozen golden-age Office episodes, among other qualities that have little to do with License to Wed itself (again: just terrible).
To their credit, Big Miracle is a lot better than License to Wed; rather than waste its talented (and once again TV-heavy) cast's time, it merely kills it, honorably. Krasinski plays Adam Carlson, a local TV newsman out of Anchorage stuck doing human-interest stories in Point Barrow, Alaska, who stumbles across a family of California gray whales trapped underneath some ice. His report gets picked up nationally, and attracts the attention of Adam's ex-girlfriend Rachel (Drew Barrymore), a Greenpeace rep who flies in, determined to save the creatures.
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