When you think about it, it’s really pretty hard to screw up a movie about surfing. With photogenic people in skimpy bathing suits, exotic locales and tropical, blue water throughout the production, the pieces are in place for an hour and a half of truly escapist cinema. Bruce Brown’s stunning film The Endless Summer is based almost entirely around these core ideals. It, therefore, came as a complete surprise that Blue Crush was rendered virtually unwatchable by co-writers Lizzy Weiss and John Stockwell’s hokey, formulaic, off-putting and genuinely unappealing storyline and set of characters.

Underdog Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) suffers a bad wipeout while surfing–she gets crushed by a massive wall of blue, hence the title–and develops an unhealthy and

destructive fear of surfing big waves. After she regains her confidence, Anne Marie begins surfing the big waves again and ends up in Hawaii’s big surfing competition against her archrival in a heated battle. Yawn.

Sports movies and movies featuring one last confrontation of fears and arch rivals have become such common place in today’s Hollywood, it has become necessary to delineate the characters and their situations to make the plotlines secondary to the formula at the heart of the picture. Ron Shelton understands this and has shown it in White Men Can’t Jump and Tin Cup. Even the Farrelly Brothers understand this, as they showed in Kingpin. Stockwell does not seem to grasp this concept as evidenced here.

Stuck with mere shells of characters and actors who do little besides presenting a pretty face to the camera, Stockwell’s Blue Crush suffers greatly. And all the gorgeous beaches and fancy cinematography in the world can’t disguise this fact.

jake lever

yes, it's true:

Blue Crush is based on a magazine article by Susan Orlean. Orlean also wrote The Orchid Thief, the book Adaptation is based on, and was played on-screen by Meryl Streep.