Review of Into the Blue (2005) by Markb. — 09 Jan 2006

Even though John Stockwell's dippy but not totally disposable underwater booty-and-booty epic wasn't actually released until October of 2005, it's really the purest mindless summer junk to come out that year.

It's not trying to be postmodern (like The Dukes of Hazzard), or lazily imitative (like The Longest Yard) or trashily noisy (like Four Brothers) or slick but totally nonnutritious (like Mr. and Mrs.

Smith). It really tries to tell a serviceable story involving two kinds of buried treasure (one legit, the other not so much); the underwater photographers really earned their paychecks and then some; the four leads fill their skimpy suits effectively, although Scott Caan and Ashley Scott are far better actors than topliners Paul Walker and Jessica Alba and therefore get to have all the moral ambiguities.

In short, Into the Blue is to cinema what Garfield's nemesis Odie is to comic strip canines: really pretty dumb, but its energy and enthusiasm make up for a lot without totally letting you forget that it's really pretty dumb.

The same goes for walker's performance; the Fast and the Furious star is a terrible actor, but his overcaffeinated dudespeak is something to behold. As for Alba (Sin City, Fantastic 4), she delivers the goods she was essentially signed on to deliver, which means that this DVD will be sold to lots of 13-year-old boys and lonely middle-aged men who want to.

..study her performance further. During the sections of the film in which the stars are required to put some clothes on for a change, Stockwell (who also did the Kate Bosworth surfing flick Blue Crush; the man gets more mileage out of the color blue than any entertainment figure since Bobby Vinton) keeps his viewers awake with some decent car chases, torture sequences and shark attacks, but ultimately spoils his movie by being just a bit TOO eager to please; few movies are destroyed in the last two minutes, but Stockwell tacks on a "have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too" coda that totally negates the central "which is more important, love or wealth?" question that actually if temporarily lent the movie some thematic weight.