Zeus and Roxanne (PG, 1997)

While spending the summer at a rented beach house, widower Terry Barnett (Steve Guttenberg) and his young son, Jordan, befriend their marine biologist neighbor, Mary Beth Dunhill (Kathleen Quinlan). Terry's dog, Zeus, strikes up an immediate kinship with Roxanne, a formerly captive dolphin that Mary Beth is trying to get to adjust to life in the open sea. While Jordan and Mary Beth's daughters plot to get their parents together, Mary Beth applies for a grant on interspecies communication, utilizing Zeus for her research. But her unscrupulous competitor, Dr. Carver, does everything he can to sabotage her work and win the grant for himself. Carver captures Zeus and Roxanne, but Zeus turns the tables and traps Carver in a net while he and Roxanne escape.

ZEUS AND ROXANNE is pleasantly innocuous when it sticks to such shameless, but effective, family-movie basics as single parents falling in love, precocious kids, and adorable animals. It offers attractive underwater photography and pretty sunsets, a broadly comic villain with a South African accent, and cute scenes of the frisky dog "talking" to the shy dolphin. Unfortunately, it becomes virtually unwatchable when the plot's focus shifts from communicating animals to Terry and Mary Beth's sappy romance.

Australian director George Miller is an old hand at these animal and nature movies, but this one is strictly a dull, by-the-numbers effort. Preteens who are able to get past the syrupy romance will get the most out of this movie.