Sometimes, finding the right way to market your movie is exceptionally hard – I mean, how do you advertise something like Fight Club, Psycho or Weapons to the general public when they are such complex and crazy movies and you only have a two-minute trailer and a few posters to do it justice? On the other hand, other films are so simple to publicise and I genuinely feel like whomever got the gig to do the ad campaign for 2005’s Into The Blue must have had the easiest twenty minutes of work in their life.
Stopping just short of just being a one sheet with the words “This Movie Contains A Wet Jessica Alba & Paul Walker” emblazoned on it, John Stockwell’s ocean-based thriller unsurprisingly leads with the greatest resource it has – the presence of scantily clad hot people doing shit in beautiful surroundings; but while the sight of Alba or Walker undulating through the sea wearing very little is its main selling point, what happens when the need of a plot becomes more desperate than the need to get to the surface?
Sam and Jared are an offensively attractive couple living a dream existence in sight of the gorgeous, sun baked beaches of Jamaica – but don’t hold that against them, because to balance out their annoyingly perfect existence, they’re also living a rustic life as they struggle to make ends meet. But while Jared is currently between jobs, he yearns to make his fortune scouring the ocean floor and discovering a wrecked ship that’ll ultimately yield riches to set him and Sam up for life. But until that happens, he just goes on about his life, avoiding working for more established treasure hunter, Derek Bates, and welcoming his childhood buddy, Bryce, who has come to visit.
In something of a counter point to Jared and Sam’s simple existence, Bryce is a boorish New York lawyer who brings new girlfriend Amanda (whom he only met the night before) with him but after nights of partying, the quartet head out for a spot of snorkeling and it’s here they make not one, but two potentially life changing discoveries. The first is that Jared discovers some artifacts that could have come from lost, legendary French pirate ship known as the Zephyr that could prove to be remarkably beneficial – however the other proves to be way more ominous. Located a short swim away from their potential discovery is a crashed plane that contains some recently dead bodies and a whole mess of cocaine and instantly the group becomes split when it comes to how they’re going to proceed.
Bryce and party girl Amanda want to go for the coke, salvage it and try to sell it whereas Sam and Jared want to secure the potential Zephyr site in case they lose their claim. However, as these attractive people bicker, other eyes are looking for the drugs in the form of the people who originally lost it.
If you’re one to not take film too seriously, there’s something innately amusing about Into The Blue literally betting the farm on placing their photogenic cast in swimwear and getting them wet. In fact, both the late Paul Walker and Jessica Alba spend so much time submerged in various bodies of H²0 throughout the film, I’m amazed they didn’t end the shoot looking like giant, pruned thumbs thanks to the amount of moisture they’d taken on. Of course, while it’s easy to make fun of a movie that’s basically Peter Yates’ adaptation of Peter Benchley’s The Deep for the Fast & Furious generation, you can’t deny that while we watch Alba’s submerged butt drift past for the umpteenth time, that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re doing. However while the film is designed to have us leer at the pretty people and damn everything else by design, there’s a sense that the filmmakers may have gotten ensnared by their own siren song.
Simply put, for a treasure hunting adventure thriller, not a lot actually happens in Into The Blue as the lion’s share of the movie alternates between our heroes sifting around at the bottom if the ocean and literally watch them do day to day tasks like hang out with friends or look for work. Granted, Walker and Alba are doing it in front of some of the most achingly beautiful vista you’ve ever seen and whenever the pace lags too far, it deploys more butt-shots than your average Fast And Furious racing sequence, but when it comes to actual plot where actual things actually happen, the film seems to have no clue where to go.
An additional issue is that while Walker and Alba are famously easy on the eyes and the do genuinely make a cute couple, they’re also dull as fucking ditchwater. Also, despite his amiable disposition, Walker’s Jared is objectively as thick as pig shit as he is unable to stop his stunningly irritating “bro” (played without a single iota of restraint by a riled up Scott Caan) putting him and his girl into a ton of danger. Literally, over two-thirds of the shit that happens to them could be avoided if Jared just ignored the fucking bro code and kicked his idiot buddy and his amoral girlfriend, to the curb. However, after what seems like an interminable about of time, director John Stockwell seems to suddenly realise that he has to insert some thrills into this thriller that doesn’t come from his cast’s physiques and the final forty minutes feature something of an upturn in quality as the script suddenly throws in betrayals, villain turns, underwater grappling and some surprisingly graphic shark attacks that sees that blue, blue ocean run a little red. Frankly, it’s too little too late – but it is appreciated, even if the twists are about as obvious as that ad campaign.
I mean, I don’t think anyone will be truly surprised by Josh Brolin and his bad guy goatee suddenly being revealed as the film’s mystery big bad, but I’d much rather dumb films be dumb while in motion, than just languishing around, being dumb in stasis. Thus we get sharks biting people in the crotch, underwater explosions crushing people to death and both Jared and Bryce outwitting hardened criminals with their superhuman ability to not drown under any circumstances (at one point Bryce disguises himself in plain sight as a drowned pilot in a ploy that might be the dumbest thing I’d seen that year). It’s fun, fast and pretty entertaining, but it also makes you wonder why the film took so bloody long to actually pick up speed when the plane full of coke is discovered fairly early on in the film.
While Stockwell certainly knows how to shoot both the Bahamas, underwater footage and his leads, stunning vistas and beguiling footage of various sea creatures only go so far when the plot refuses to put its foot on the throttle until well into its final third. However, if watching either Jessica Alba or Paul Walker scuba dive in revealing clothing floats your boat, Into The Blue admittedly lives up to the promises offered up by the posters pretty well. Only worth it if you need something to tide you over, I suppose…
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