Into the Blue: Movie, DVD, Blu-ray disc Review (2005)

(Originally published Sept. 30, 2005)

"You wanna keep trickin'? Or you wanna start pimpin'?"

These words, spoken with unapologetic verve by the young actress Ashley Scott in the new movie "Into the Blue," get to the vibe of the picture, which uses a wealth of pseudohip street slang to help it connect, in theory, with its intended audience of teens and twentysomethings.

Thing is, at my screening, whenever Scott and the other actors started talking trash in an effort to keep it real, there was the sense from the low bubble of laughter that laced through the crowd that the crowd was having none of it.

The film, a buried-treasure adventure thriller from director John Stockwell ("Blue Crush"), is essentially soft-core porn for the PG-13 set. The movie has more oiled skin and nearly naked bodies than anything in Maxim or Blender, which in comparison look like throwbacks to the Good House Keeping magazines of the 1950s--albeit without the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Set in the Bahamas, the film stars Paul Walker as Jared Cole, a down-on-his-luck diving instructor seeking bigger things and a brighter future in a better tomorrow with his girlfriend, Sam (Jessica Alba), who works at a local aquarium handling sharks when she's not warming up Jared's bed.

Together, Jared and Sam are perfect for each other. Neither especially likes clothing, both are totally into tanning, and they are in love with each other almost to the point of being blind to everything around them. This helps to serve the plot, which thickens with the arrival of Jared's buddy, Bryce (Scott Caan), a buff lawyer from New York whose trouble-causing trick, Amanda (Scott), looks like heroin chic shot through gauze.

When Bryce and Amanda get the bright idea to smuggle drugs off the sunken plane they find while snorkeling, temptation strikes, loves stretches to the breaking point, and good and evil are forced to duke it out in the deep.

Speaking of the deep, "Into the Blue" will remind some of the 1977 thriller "The Deep"--and for good reason. The film's executive producer is Peter Guber, who produced "The Deep," which found Jacqueline Bisset, then in her prime, in a story of sunken treasure, deadly eels, and little clinking bottles of drugs busily being vacuumed aboard a bum ship. The movie capitalized on the success of "Jaws," which came just two years before it, but it worked because real tension was generated within the murk.

It's the murk that makes these two movies so different. What "The Deep" understood is that the less you see, the more you fear. It's the idea of what's there in the not there that keeps you on edge. This is why "Open Water" worked so well. It's also why audiences responded to "The Blair Witch Project," which used the dark to its considerable benefit.

"Into the Blue" takes another approach--it assumes that we have no imagination, so it shows us everything. Here, the water is so clear, there's never any question where the sharks are roaming. They're all around the beautiful actors, all around the beautiful fish, doing their menacing ballet while corruption and stupidity breeds around them. When they do lash out to take a bite out of crime--as you know they will--there's no shock involved. Instead, it's just blood and gore in another underwhelming movie.

Grade: C-