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Beautiful bodies frolic to no effect

By Manohla Dargis
NY Times News Service, New York
Friday, Oct 07, 2005, Page 16

PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES

In the soggy adventure Into the Blue, the supertoned, ultratanned actors Paul Walker and Jessica Alba spend much of their screen time submerged in the sapphire depths of the Bahamian archipelago. All this splish-splashing serves this throwaway entertainment on two counts: for one thing, with their mouths plugged, the actors are spared the painful work of delivering the unspeakable dialogue. More important, these underwater interludes strip away any pretense that a flick like this exists for any reason except to show a couple of hotties shimmying about in as few clothes as is PG-13 permissible.

As Sam, a shark-feeding water nymph employed by an entertainment complex, Alba favors an itty-bitty bikini that appears a few sizes too small. Walker's character, Jared, a scuba instructor and would-be treasure hunter, prefers the low-slung, hip-skimming trunks favored by Abercrombie and Fitch models. Blond and glazed the kind of orange brown popular with Eurotrash designers, Sam and Jared are in love of a kind and given to displays of relatively chaste affection. In the ideal version of Into the Blue -- one that runs about 30 minutes shorter -- these two would share the love more, if only to distract attention away from the creaking plot. Alas, the PG-13 world demands more plot (and usually more violence) and less hanky-panky.

This film's sunken plot fails to excite.

Written by Matt Johnson, the plot, or what passes for one, hinges on a sunken treasure ship that, in a remarkable coincidence, Jared, Sam and their equally blond and bland friends, the odious Bryce (Scott Caan) and the innocuous Amanda (Ashley Scott), discover next to a downed plane laden with cocaine. The bad blonds want the drugs; the good blonds want to stick to the buried riches. A moral dilemma straight out of high school ethics class ensues, as does some flabby intrigue involving a salvage king (played by a grizzled Josh Brolin) and some gun-toting villainy. Every so often, in between the intrigue and the exposition, the blonds shed their clothes and take the plunge, summoning up wistful memories of Jacqueline Bisset and her T-shirt in The Deep.

This undiluted nonsense is best suited to DVD-rental desperation. Still, aficionados of cheap cinematic thrills involving beautiful and stupid young people will be happy to learn that while the film fizzles far more than it sizzles, its director, John Stockwell, is a connoisseur of the female backside, which he displays to great and frequent advantage. Alba elicits most of Stockwell's attention: he films her posterior as worshipfully as George Cukor filmed Garbo's face. But it is Scott, as the resident bad girl, who is the focus of one of the most startling images in recent memory: a shot of her from the point-of-view of someone about to engage in an act that, until a 2003 Supreme Court decision, was banned in half the states in the US.

Into the Blue Directed by: John Stockwell Starring: Paul Walker (Jared), Jessica Alba (Sam), Scott Caan (Bryce), Ashley Scott (Amanda), John Brolin (Bates), Tyson Beckford (Primo) and James Frain (Reyes) Running time: 110 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

Now that's entertainment.
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