Into the Blue

By David Germain
Associated Press

Our rating:

Director John Stockwell is lost at sea with "Into the Blue," a diving adventure with a severe case of the dramatic bends.

Like Stockwell's passable beach romance "Blue Crush," "Into the Blue" is a treasure trove for images of beautiful, bland people looking impossibly tanned and perfect against the bubbly surf.

But the story is a long, tall glass of seawater, with characters who are mostly unlikable for their annoying self-absorption and supreme stupidity and action sequences as turgid and mucky as an offshore dredging operation.

At times, "Into the Blue" seems to exist solely to show off Jessica Alba's body. But realizing this isn't a Sports Illustrated swimsuit video, Stockwell and company string a silly tale of shipwrecks, fortune seekers and drug smugglers between their eye-candy montages of Alba and co-star Paul Walker cavorting above and below the waves.

Walker's Jared Cole is a mildly scruffy pretty boy living in a trailer in the Bahamas with girlfriend Sam Nicholson (Alba), a shark handler at a nearby tourist resort.

Sam loves their quiet, uneventful, smoochy life, but Jared dreams of fixing up his rickety boat and searching for sunken vessels bearing lost riches.

He gets his chance when old college buddy Bryce (Scott Caan) comes for a visit with new girlfriend Amanda (Ashley Scott). A Manhattan defense lawyer, Bryce has use of a beachside mansion and monster yacht belonging to a happy client.

Off the two couples go for some innocent diving adventures that lead to two discoveries: A 150-year-old shipwreck presumably containing hundreds of millions of dollars in treasure, and a fortune in cocaine inside a cargo plane that crashed close by.

Inevitably, our gang ends up in a whirlpool of trouble with the law, rival treasure hunters and drug runners.

Screenwriter Matt Johnson continues the tradition of inane action and cardboard characters he began with the racing thriller "Torque." Good guys and bad in "Into the Blue" behave with inexplicable idiocy.

Walker's Jared is such a boring lunkhead, it's impossible to care about his aspirations or his fate, while his and Caan's frat-boy exchanges are grating.

Alba's saintly Sam musters some sympathy, but even though she's the brains of the outfit, her bloodstream still seems to be running a tad low on oxygen.

"I believe in you more than the prospect of any treasure," Sam coos to Jared.

Shane Hurlbut's cinematography buoys the movie, but his lovely pictures of the actors swimming among sharks, jellyfish and shimmery aquatic vegetation cannot compensate for everything else.

Maybe it's time for director Stockwell to try something on dry land.

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