It took a long time, but a movie has arrived to make “The Deep” look good.
You remember “The Deep,” right? Peter Benchley’s 1977 follow-up to “Jaws,” starring Jacqueline Bisset’s wet T-shirt in a story of sunken Caribbean treasure? Not much of a movie, but it looks like a classic next to “Into the Blue,” a wretched new film on roughly the same subject.
We are in the Bahamas, where Jared (Paul Walker) and Sam (Jessica Alba) live on his broken-down boat, poor but tanned. Why shouldn’t they be happy? They’re completely vapid.
Jared’s buddy Bryce (Scott Caan) arrives for a visit, with a one-night stand named Amanda (Ashley Scott) in tow. Diving one day, the quartet finds a jewel-encrusted dagger that looks like a $1.99 toy from the drugstore. Jared’s convinced this is evidence of a billion-dollar shipwreck.
Wouldn’t you know it, the history-making find is just a few yards away from a downed plane loaded with gobs of cocaine. The rules of sea salvage mean that our heroes can’t just tell the police about the plane, because that would mess up their rights to the pirate booty. So they must try to work in secret, while competitors watch their every move.
And speaking of booty, let’s turn to the real subject of the picture. Without flirting with an R rating, “Into the Blue” displays enough young, perfect skin to satisfy even a discriminating lecher. The camera surveys Jessica Alba’s body as though it were a stalker in need of a restraining order.
Paul Walker (from “The Fast and the Furious”) and Alba (late of “Fantastic Four”) are pretty well matched in the utter vacuity of their line readings. Spending an entire film with the main foursome is like being trapped in a classroom with the kids who got held back a few grades.
The director is John Stockwell, who got a few interesting things into the teen-movie formula of “crazy/beautiful” and “Blue Crush,” but is lost here.
The nice underwater photography – and there’s a lot of it – is overpowered by the creaky plot and dumb dialogue. It’s cool that they got so much footage of real sharks swarming around the actors, but it’s not cool that you start wishing the sharks will wake up and revert to their basic instincts.
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