Blue Crush 2 Blu-ray Review
Hang zero.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, June 6, 2011
Ah, for the carefree, innocent days of
Beach Blanket Bingo or even
Gidget. You know, those sun drenched movies (no one would even go so far as to call them "films") where teenage shenanigans met with the latest dance craze, forgettable romances and usually lamentable music. But you know one thing that films�er, movies like
Beach Blanket Bingo and
Gidget didn't have? Delusions of grandeur, that's what. These small scale efforts knew exactly what they wanted to be. In
Gidget's case, it was a teen coming of age story, wrapped up with some romance and cast amid the waves and sand. The whole Frankie and Annette series didn't even have
those limited ambitions. The Avalon and Funicello franchise wasn't about much else than mindless fun, a sort of filmic wallpaper that usually played in drive-ins (remember those?) where the target audience probably wasn't paying that much attention to the movie in the first place, if you catch my drift. The first
Blue Crush movie had at least the ostensibly noble aim (stop laughing) of highlighting the need for something akin to professional women's competitive surfing. If it did so in a melodramatic and turgid dramatic environment, there was at least that saving grace. But what does
Blue Crush 2 really have to offer? Well, there are bounteous babes in bikinis, that's certainly a major plus. And there's some absolutely fantastic footage of surfers, male and female, including some up close and personal shots inside the tube that defy description. The South African setting of
Blue Crush 2 also provides the film (whoops, movie) with a spectacularly beautiful locale. And, ladies and gents, that's about it. This is the silliest, most predictable, dramatically inert and lifeless piece of crap, blue or otherwise, that has come down the pike in quite some time.
You know you're in for a long haul, despite this film's roughly two hour running length, when you hear yourself actually sighing out loud within moments of it starting up amid supposed home movies where our heroine Dana (Sasha Jackson) watches idyllic footage of her long dead mother hanging ten. Dana has a strained relationship with a �ber-rich Los Angeles father (Gideon Emory, who looks barely old enough to be Dana's brother, let alone her father), and decides on a lark to travel to her mother's native country of South Africa in order to visit a number of surf sites her Mom had written about in a journal before she passed away from cancer.
The bulk of
Blue Crush 2, then, ultimately turns into a sort of road movie where Sasha and her new best friend Pushy (Elizabeth Mathis), a native South African surfer Dana meets on a bus. Almost right off the bat, Pushy and Dana deal with the scornful attitude of the reigning Queen of what is trumped up as an actual competitive event, when it in fact serves as little more than a product placement
tour de force for women's sporting gear enterprise Roxy. That Queen is named Tara (Sharni Vinson), and, boy, is Dana ever surprised when Pushy takes Dana back to her beach bum hideout and finds out Tara lives there too. I'm sure your jaw is agape.
At the beach bum hideout, Dana is introduced to a whole slew of kids out to find themselves, which they do by getting really drunk and playing limbo to oppressively loud reggae music. Dana is immediately torn�
torn, I tell you�between two muscular hunks, Grant (Chris Fisher), a beach bar owner and womanizer whom Dana had actually met on the flight over to South Africa (of course, South Africa being such a small place and all), and Tim (Ben Milliken), a super-nice guy who works in an animal reserve saving endangered elephants. I mean,
really. Anyway, three guesses which one Dana ends up with, but only after making the wrong choice first. After all, we have two hours to kill, unless you end up killing yourself just to put yourself out of misery.
Soon Dana and Pushy are out retracing Dana's Mother's footsteps (and/or surf-steps) on a cross country trip which takes them to a variety of really gorgeous locations. We have the twin love stories playing out, as well as another subplot of Pushy trying to win a spot on the "Roxy" team, supposedly against Tara's wishes. And, oh, lest I forget, Dana has also been robbed and must�
must, I tell you�reclaim her Mother's priceless carved Tiki head. No, I'm
not making it up, I swear to you.
This film is so completely predictable I was literally calling out what was going to happen next from approximately two minutes into this mess, something I was able to do until the final credits rolled. This is paint by numbers screenwriting of the saddest and most lamentable kind, actually appalling, really. There are only two saving graces (not counting the bounteous babes in bikinis) to
Blue Crush 2. The location footage, including of course the spectacular surfing sequences, is uniformly outstanding and gives the movie some real visual sweep. In fact, there are some shots in this movie which are jaw droppingly beautiful. The other thing, which is actually kind of funny, only becomes obvious if you watch some of the featurettes and listen to the commentary. Virtually ever actor in this film is doing a dialect directly opposite to their native idiolect. The Australians are doing American accents, the Americans are doing South African accents, it's truly astounding. That so much time should have been spent perfecting pretty nice sounding accents is actually laugh out loud hilarious when most of the rest of this movie is such a bedraggled catastrophe.
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