Sun, sea, stupid story & smiles! (Into The Blue (DVD))

Name: Ailran

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Product:	Into The Blue (DVD)
Date:	27.03.06 (110 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The setting, the fun story, the bodies on show!

Disadvantages: Plot & acting

Can you really hate a film that is full of sun, sand, sea and sexy bodies in swimwear in these cold dark winter nights? Nope I don’t think so and Into The Blue is full of all four of those S’s, as the trailer neatly highlights. For the women to gaze at there is Paul Walker (Fast and The Furious) & Scott Caan (Ocean’s Eleven) and for the men there is Jessica Alba (Fantastic Four) and Ashley Scott (Birds of Prey TV series)

Alba is Sam and Walker plays Jared, two sun lovers working and living in the Bahamas. She is a shark trainer, or at least works with them, and he is a tourist diver. Taking tourists out into the ocean and teaching them the basics of diving.
They would love to find one of the many long lost treasure wrecks buried beneath the sea and sand around the islands and make enough money to not ‘live by the clock’ as Jared puts it.
A recent hurricane, a phenomena that can shift the sand on the sea bed enough to reveal wrecks undiscovered for centuries, gives them hope of finally finding one.
The arrival of Bruce (Caan), Jared’s best friend and a rich lawyer, and his current girlfriend, Amanda, could give them the money to finance a search. But can they persuade him to give them the money, does he have enough anyway and will they be able to find what they want?

While trying to start up their plans they spend their time catching up, fishing, diving and sunbathing together. It is while diving they make two discoveries……… the first is evidence of a potential wreck site and the second is a smashed up plane which must have crashed into the sea, a plane loaded to the gills with drugs.

Discovering the plane causes no end pf problems for the quartet, they want to try and uncover the shipwreck but don’t have the money to hire the specialist equipment they really need to help them find the right spot to dig. The drugs are worth millions and just recovering a selling a couple of the packages would give them all the money they need. They should report discovering the plane but to do so would mean they cannot dig for the wreck and the police authorities may uncover the wreck while recovering the plane.

Do they grab the drugs and sell them, as Bryce and Amanda want to do, or do they ignore them and continue to dig for the wreck with their primitive equipment, as Sam and Jared would prefer?
Can their friendship survive this? And what happens if the man who lost the drugs in the first place discovers someone has found them and wants his lost produce back again?

Okay so you wouldn’t ever even contemplate calling Into The Blue high art, you couldn’t really call it a great action film either, but much to my surprise I found it highly enjoyable, in a lightweight switch of your brain kinda way.

The story is well scripted, the acting is adequate enough (generally the four main stars spend most of their on screen time in swim wear and all look great). The story in the main is very predictable from start to finish, though it has to be said that there are a couple of nice twists to it. As it doesn’t set out to be more than that though who can complain? What you see in the trailers is exactly what you get!

The four stars do exactly what is needed…… looking good and saying their lines! Josh Brolin also appears as a rival ‘treasure hunter’ and is almost unrecognisable, it was about two thirds of the way through before I realised it was him! I have liked his acting since the TV series Young Riders many years ago and he is always very reliable, whether as a good guy () or as a bad guy ().

This film is all about the look whether of the actors, as I’ve mentioned, or the stunning scenery. It is just beautiful and you really just want to jump into the water yourself. The laid back, sun drenched lifestyle they live is just so appealing. You feel the sun beating down, you feel refreshed as they dive into those cool blue waters, of course the sharks put you off a bit but they are as scared of you as you are of them, or so we are told!

I think what makes this enjoyable though is that it is not a film overloaded with action, it is well plotted and the excitement comes in chunks, slotted in around some great characterisation. You do get to know the four main characters and begin to think you will know how they will react.

So do I recommend this film or not…… is kind of hard to decide but I think the best way to put it is that if this review and the back of the DVD sounds appealing to you then you almost certainly will enjoy the film, maybe not like it but enjoy it. If you don’t like the stars, or the sound of an action like film set in a sunny climate, then you will probably find this boring.
For me it is a film that I did like, I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again but I wouldn’t be averse to watching it if it was on or a friend had hired it out!


Directed by John Stockwell (Blue Crush, Crazy/Beautiful)
Written by Matt Johnson (Torque is the only other thing he has written)
Certificate: 15

On a weird footnote kind of thing this film did finally give me an answer to something I have wanted to know for ages. Blessid Union of Souls have a great song where the lead singer says he ‘looks like Tyson Beckford’. Tyson is in this film and now I do at last know what he looks like and the annoyance of never having heard of the man is finally solved! I know pointless in a review but it made ME so happy :o)

Summary: A fin action film that is certainly worth a look.