Flak Magazine: Review of Blue Crush, 8-30-02

This could be your lucky summer. If your major objection to recent Mountain Dew commercials is the lack of T&A, Blue Crush was made especially for you. Perhaps the obvious dismissal of this surfing movie is to say it simply rides in the wake of Coyote Ugly, but true bad-movie aficionados will understand that the movie is actually a Thrashin' for modern chicks. Not modern women, mind you; modern chicks. Modern women would not be so likely to lovingly refer to each other as "hootchie." Or, if they did, it wouldn't be quite so apt a term.

Dismissing the plot of the movie may be way too easy, but let's be honest: Hardly anyone will be showing up for the story or acting anyway. They want what Blue Crush offers — plenty of shots of hot flesh and some very visceral thrills. "Eye candy" has perhaps never been a more fitting term. For moments, the pleasure is there. A sequence of surfing to POD or the near-Friday hilarity of seeing overweight football players surf make the movie nearly bearable. However, the thrills eventually leave you feeling vaguely ill and wishing for something more substantial.

The unfortunate thing is that the groundwork for a more substantial and interesting set of conflicts is there. At times, though; only at times. While the dialogue even rises to the level of "interesting" in some scenes, nothing ever gets as well-developed as the female characters' breasts. Nothing else gets their screen time, either.

The sense of camaraderie the veteran female surfers have for the up-and-comers could have easily helped the movie transcend the bikini-chick genre had it been explored before the last 20 minutes of the movie. Other opportunities to craft more engaging characters are also narrowly avoided; storylines like the Lilo & Stitch-esque sister-as-mother subplot or the class struggle that accidentally creeps into the movie could have evoked some genuine drama.

As it stands, the characters seem to have the memory of the stereotypical MTV viewer, hating or loving each other as is convenient for the plot. Although humans are often hypocritical and contradictory, great characters have reasons for their inner struggles. Muddled motivations and inconsistent reactions make it difficult to identify very strongly with even the main character. Kate Bosworth (as surfer girl extraordinaire Anne Marie) and gang do the best they can, but Blue Crush often seems more a series of loosely linked vignettes featuring the same characters than a real movie. Younger sister Penny (who seems disturbingly pale for a Maui girl) gives Anne Marie trouble when the movie can't think of anything else to do; one of Anne Marie's friends (it doesn't particularly matter which) serves as hardass coach while the other is ditzy supporter. Then, to provide a quasi-romantic angle, a bunch of dumb football players serve as, well, dumb football players. Meanwhile, Anne Marie is haunted by a past that can apparently be entirely summarized in one sound bite and 10 lines of dialogue.

But, like Thrashin', Blue Crush was not made for character development. It was made for the vague affinity for and profit potential of an extreme sport. The montages do give a sense of fun in the sun and leave the audience with a desire to try surfing. And why not? It's a summer movie, after all. Watching people have fun in the sun is much easier than putting forth the effort to actually have fun in the sun. Plus, the outdoors fails to offer the air conditioning of multiplexes.

Perhaps Blue Crush was really made for the starry-eyed girls who love to see other young women be extreme and the horny older brothers and fathers who will eagerly take their youngsters to see this movie. In that case, Blue Crush is a success on every level. Well, on both levels, anyway.

— Zeke Jarvis (ecjarvis at uwm dot edu)