Flashy-looking 'The Cave' lacks substance and suspense

Friday, August 26, 2005

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

A high-concept creature feature that manages to fumble the concept and the creature in its sloppy execution, "The Cave" follows a team of daredevil scuba divers hired to lead an expedition through a massive underwater cave system under the Carpathian Mountains.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE CAVE

DIRECTOR: Bruce Hunt

CAST: Cole Hauser, Morris Chestnut, Eddie Cibrian, Lena Headey, Piper Perabo

RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for intense creature violence.

GRADE: D

LINKS/TRAILERS
· Official site

PHOTO GALLERY

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Of course, here there be monsters.

When the slimy, sonar-enhanced creatures start picking them off one by one ("They're playing with us," hisses steely team leader Cole Hauser, who knows more than he's letting on), the film descends into one of the most banal survival adventures to lurch out of Hollywood.

It wants to be a subterranean "Pitch Black," with a predatory creature that looks like the love child of "Alien" and a pterodactyl, and turns out to be the genetically enhanced cousin of J.R.R. Tolkein's Gollum.

It's a handsome-looking production in an intriguingly unique setting, and former assistant director and special effects director Bruce Hunt has a knack for showing the way things work without a lot of exposition. That has its benefits in a film in which people are constantly pulling out high-tech equipment, but it doesn't work so well as a story approach and it makes a mess of a relatively simple plot.

With all that dark, moody photography and visual atmosphere, you'd at least expect something resembling mood. The utter lack of tension or suspense is as dumbfounding as Hunt's blender approach to editing, which purees action scenes into incoherent mashes of image confetti.

Rest assured that when Hauser's loyal lieutenant, Morris Chestnut, intones the phrase "Respect the cave," he's not referring to the movie.