Posted: 08/16/2002

Blue Crush

(2002)

by Hank Yuloff

Blue Crush is an “After School Special” of a TV movie featuring awesome oceanic photography, some excellent surfing and a “Girl Power” message that doesn’t quite make the mark.

Mixed review? You betcha.

Director Ron Underwood (City Slickers, Mighty Joe Young) throws every possible photographic trick at us—some a nauseating amount of times -while telling us the story of Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth from Beware of the Titans), a sort of local Hawaiian howlie surfer who overcomes her fears to attain her dreams.

Well, most of them.

We open one week before the Master Pipe Surfing Championships. Anne Marie is an invited competitor, though she hasn’t competed for three years after a near drowning incident. Cool. Given this opportunity, you’d expect her life to be wrapped around training, right?

Nope.

She’s distracted by giving surfing lessons to an NFL quarterback who is in town for the Pro Bowl. I guess a girl needs to pay rent. Rent. Are you kidding? For a shack right on the water in Hawaii. Are you kidding? That land should be filled with condos—or be so expensive that she andher two surfer chick/hotel maid buddies could never afford it. Or as Anne Marie puts it, she’d like to be able to pay the rent, the electric bill and some other utility all in the same month.

But such are the inconsistencies in a movie that SCREAMS “Girl Power” but has the heroine rely on a man to give her direction when she’s confused. His advice—be the girl he met on the beach who would never take advice from a man.

Early on in the movie we learn her goals:

-To be the best surfer in the world.

-To win the Master Pipe (I kept snickering at the sexual reference

here).

-To get a sponsor.

-To see (or BE) the first girl on the cover of Surf magazine.

-To find love (I added that because of the movie’s story line).

You’ll see her get a few of these, but don’t see it happen in a theater. Wait for the DVD where you get to hear the back story from the director on how this was shot. There is plenty of “bathroom material” for preadolescent boys in the target demographic, though no bare breasts or anything but bikinis galore. There were some safe sex messages delivered in a rather graphic way and the teenie boppers were all atwitter with nervous laughter at the site of a used condom being bandied about on the beach.

The acting was pretty good, especially Michelle Rodriguez (Fast and the Furious), Kala Alexander (The Patriot, Hearts in Atlantis) and newcomer Sanoe Lake as Boswells pals. And they ALL look good in their beach attire. Very good.

I also dug the MTV video style of photography of the surfing. They did alot of it which made it a bit tiresome, but it was well done.

You know what I really wanted to see? In one of the 100’s (no exaggeration) of shots from the bottom of the ocean looking up, I was dying to hear those magic notes accompanying a big ‘ol white shark heading for the surface to munch on one of our characters. Now that’s entertainment.

Hank Yuloff is an LA kind of guy who never really liked beach pictures. Unless they included girls in bikinis. Or less. Hmmmm. Guess he did like them.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com