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Friday, September 30, 2005
It's the wrong season for the diluted 'Into the Blue'
The misplaced summer movie, "Into the Blue," is an undistinguished treasure-hunting epic that rips off the 1977 movie, "The Deep," in virtually every frame. It's pretty to look at, but so low-voltage and instantly forgettable that it's hardly worth anyone's time.
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View all photosIt stars Paul Walker as a 29-year-old beach bum who lives in idyllic poverty and romantic bliss on a Bahaman island with his true love, Jessica Alba, dreaming of salvaging some sunken ship or finding some long-forgotten Caribbean pirate loot.
The first quarter of the movie plays like a new millennium version of "Beach Party," with endless shots of the stars' attractive young bodies slithering through the water to the accompaniment of a succession of inappropriate pop songs.
It finally gets down to business when Walker's best friend (Scott Caan) -- the movie year's most annoying character -- drops by for a visit, and on their first dive together the group finds the wreck of an ancient ship carrying a gold cargo worth a hundred mil or so.
And it's not the only treasure on the spot! By an amazing coincidence central to the script, they also find the wreck of a drug runner's airplane that crashed only a few days before with a zillion sealed packages of cocaine overflowing its cargo hold.
As the friends scramble to find money for a salvage operation, they fall out about the moral issue of what to do with the drug half of the treasure and inadvertently alert the suspicions of the Bahamian Mafia. Then things get complicated and the body count starts to rise.
Whatever this movie is, it's not much of a star vehicle: Walker, sporting a burr haircut, is terminally awkward and unexciting; Alba does better, but she's fairly scarce in the story and her romantic scenes with Walker have the sparkle of a day-old Dr. Pepper.
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