My Penguin Friend

by Mike McGranaghan

My Penguin Friend tries to tell a story where there is no story. In 2016, a man from Brazil went viral because he discovered and cared for a wayward penguin who spent the next eight years making an annual 5,000-mile swim to visit him. That’s an undeniably charming anecdote. It’s also one without inherent drama. The movie stretches it out to 97 minutes, halfheartedly trying to manufacture some sort of suspense only toward the end. Your kids may want to see the film for the cute penguin, but they’ll resent you for making them endure the near non-stop boredom.

Jean Reno plays the man, Joao. He finds the oil-covered penguin, dubbed Dindim, and cleans it up. His wife Maria (Adriana Barraza) doesn’t understand why he’s so committed to the creature. Townspeople are charmed by Dindim. That note repeats over and over (and over and over). In the last act, there’s a suggestion that some big bad scientific lab wants to capture the penguin for study, and the final five minutes build to a manipulative, predictable climax wherein we’re made to think Dindim might possibly be dead.

The screenplay by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich is quite a piece of work. In fact, it sounds AI-generated. People in this movie talk like robots, in dialogue that completely lacks style. Characters either flatly describe what’s going on or speak lines designed to impart a specific piece of information. Nobody has an actual conversation. It’s almost as if the actors learned their English dialogue phonetically and are struggling to remember what they’re supposed to say.

Director David Schurmann is apparently under the impression that having an abundance of penguin footage is sufficient to hold the audience’s attention. Yes, the creatures are fun to look at. You can see them doing their own far more fascinating thing in the documentary March of the Penguins. Here, footage of Dindim and others is utilized in favor of an actual plot. Even worse, Schurmann demonstrates zero ability to wring emotion or humor from a scene, much less build suspense. The friendship between Joao and Dindim is supposed to be heart-warming, but lacking a reason to care about either of them prevents that intention from succeeding.

One-dimensional characters do the movie no favors either. Nor does the intrusive musical score that’s constantly there to remind you of how you’re meant to feel. A couple scenes rely on a CGI penguin. They’re bad, too, failing to look sufficiently real. You can see better animation in Happy Feet. Reno and Barraza are capable actors. Without anything to work with, both flounder in a sea of incompetent filmmaking. The other actors give amateurish performances at best.

My Penguin Friend has nothing going for it aside from some nice shots of the flightless birds. This is a tedious, uninspired movie guaranteed to bore kids and adults alike.

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