Into the Blue Movie Review

I wonder what went through the studio exec’s head when he found out about the release schedule of Into the Blue. It’s a movie about fun in the Caribbean sun that’s coming out while the Caribbean is in hurricane season. It’s an extended swimsuit ad that’s coming out when people won’t be buying swimsuits. That alone should start the pissed off product reps lining up at his door with baseball bats. But if he thinks that beating is bad, he should wait until the people that saw the movie show up.

Into the Blue isn’t just a bad movie. It’s an endless font of implausibility and boredom whose only redeeming quality is watching the his and hers sex symbols on the screen.

This movie has a plot on the level of "See Spot Run." This is hot guy (formally: Jared, played by Paul Walker). Hot guy likes to dive but hates authority. Intro hot girl (formally: Sam, played by Jessica Alba). Hot girl is a shark handler at an amusement park. Hot girl cares for nothing except for hot boy. Hot boy and hot girl are so poor they live in a trailer (and yet can afford enough designer swimsuits to fill a Sports Illustrated catalog) and have a boat half-flooded with water.

Enter creepy old treasure hunter (Josh Brolin). He will come back later.

Enter less hot guy (formally: Bryce, brother of hot guy, played Scott Caan) and less hot girl (formally: Amanda, some girl Bryce just met at the club, played by Ashley Scott). Bryce is a lawyer. Lawyer has deadbeat drug dealer client that leaves mansion, speedboat, and jet skis as payment. The four gleefully head off to the middle of the ocean, where they promptly swim down to fetch a dropped wristwatch and find sunken treasure instead.

I’d like stress two key points as to just how bad Into the Blue gets. Number one: At the point they find the sunken treasure we're already about 30 minutes into the movie. A half an hour of your life has slipped, well, into the blue by the time the movie even gets to the main point. If this movie didn’t spend so much time in the water it’d be dragging it’s feet on the sand like Keyser Soze. Number two: At this point they’re snorkeling… 150 feet below the water.

Maybe I’m caught up in the details. Maybe I just can’t believe that even a girl like Jessica Alba has that kind of lung capacity. Or that I can’t ignore that their lungs would explode any one of the two dozen times in the movie they go up from that deep in a few seconds. But the one thing I can never buy is that, when looking at a sunken wreck with nothing but a snorkel, you’d think to yourself, “Let me check out the darker, creepier water another hundred yards away.”

But lo and behold, just this happens in Into the Blue. And instead of funding buried treasure, they find a cocaine supply that would make Kate Moss think it’ s Christmas in July.

The next 45 minutes are spent in a half celebratory moral debate – to deal or not to deal. As they chop this issue up like a line on a mirror, you slowly sink into your seat wondering where it all went wrong and when, if ever, this movie will get exciting. Even when the action finally hits (after more than an hour out of a thankfully short movie), it’s not exactly exciting. There’s a shark attack here, a crazed drug dealer there, and a load of boredom in between.

There is not one level of production in the film that isn’t flawed in some respect (even the poster has the faces above the wrong names). There is not one redeeming quality to this movie, and no reason to see it aside from pure star-struck salivation… and even that wears off after about the 20th close up of Alba’s backside.

Where's a shark when you need him?