Review of Blue Crush (2002) by Jiana W — 14 Jun 2011

"Blue Crush" is the surfer girl anthem. It focuses on Anne Marie, a young surfer who resides in a small house with her two best friends and baby sister in the laidback, island paradise of Maui. When she's not trying to keep her little sister from partying too much or working a thankless job as a house keeper at a local hotel, she's on the beach, taking on waves with her friends and preparing for the Pipe Masters. A chance encounter has her hooking up with a pro football player named Matt, a guy who everyone unconvincingly claims is a quarterback. (Matt is small and has no discerning muscles to really speak of so why they wrote him in as a professional *football* player is beyond me.) Anyway, her relationship with Matt causes a slight rift between Anne Marie and Eden, her roommate who also doubles as her no-nonsense trainer for the competition. Eden thinks she's too distracted by this guy. Can Anne Marie get it together in time to rock the Pipe Masters? I think we all know the end to this.

The locale is beautiful and the lifestyle alluring. These surfers seem to live the life. Eat, surf, sleep, repeat. And they can get paid for it. The cinematography is also fantastic and takes us right into the waves with the action, capturing the surfers as they get barreled and various other angles on the waves. It all looks completely fun and exciting.

The bad things about this movie are the dialogue, acting, predictability, and body-doubling/face-pasting. The dialogue is absolutely awful at some points and the actors, most of whom aren't that good really, can't deliver them believably. As a live example of this, the d-bag character, Drew. Listen to his jibes and insults and you'll see what I'm talking about. The storyline is just too predictable. We know everything's going to end happily and she's going to conquer her fear and win the big competition and win the guy's heart. The body doubling and face pasting were WAY too obvious. I could be mistaken but the audience is supposed to wonder whether the actors really *did* their own stunts. Whenever Anne Marie was surfing, it was so obvious it wasn't her. And in one scene, where she's getting barrelled, the camera has the audacity to have a close-up of her special FX face as she cruises by. It was terrible.

Ultimately, "Blue Crush" is a girl-power kind of movie that plays up the romanticisms of the surfer lifestyle. If I could give everything up and do what these girls do, boy oh boy would I.