So I got played one more time, like every time they market a movie around the sexiness of its actresses. You’d think I’d learned by now that “hot babes flicks” always turn out disappointing but no, I still thought “Blue Crush” might be great fun. It isn’t, dear God it isn’t! Sure, the surfer girls are pleasant to look at, but the characters they play are dumb, giggly and utterly annoying. They sing along with the radio! They bicker constantly! They get grossed out by hotel rooms! They give each other would-be inspirational speeches! And, of course, goof around in countless MTV-ready musical montages! It’s Crossroads and/or The Sweetest Thing all over again, aargghh!
Except that they surf, too, though that’s unfortunately not much less tedious either. Director (and co-writer) John Stockwell kind of delivers the “rad surfing sequences” he promised, with cool shots of the girls (or their stunt doubles?) riding their board over and through huge waves… But how different can one “rad surfing sequence” be from another? As the Beach Boys sing, “You paddle out turn around and raise, and baby that’s all there is to the coastline craze, you gotta catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of the world.” Then rinse and repeat through the whole movie until every one watching it is silently wishing for everyone to just drown already!
“If everybody had an ocean
Across the U. S. A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like Californi-a
You’d seem ’em wearing their baggies
Huarachi sandals too
A bushy bushy blonde hairdo
Surfin’ U. S. A.”
Kate Bosworth plays Anne Marie aka that tired old chick flick staple, the girl-with-a-dream-but-oh-so-scared-to-reach-for-it. She’s like Violet in Coyote Ugly basically, except that instead of wanting to sing but having stage fright Anne Marie longs to be a pro surfer even though she’s terrified of breaking her neck. Plots don’t get much simpler than that, yet the movie feels the need to remind us of this over and over as if it was intended for “very special” audiences! I wanted to stand up and yell “OK! The pipe is a deadly wave! And the girl’s scared of hurting herself! Got it, move on!”
“I have watched you on the shore
Standing by the ocean’s roar
Do you love me do you surfer girl
Surfer girl surfer girl”
Of course, when Anne Marie is not failing repeatedly because she’s too psyched to “commit” and catch a wave, our “Baywatch Barbie” has to be matched with her Ken, a rich NFL pretty boy quarterback played by Matt Davis. He gives her 1000$ for surfing lessons= she makes out with him. He buys her fancy clothes=she sleeps with him. Ain’t romance grand? Why is it that every female protagonist in movies needs a man to push her into accomplishing anything? At least they could match her with someone less bland than Davis, like his NFL buddy played by Faizon Love as a fat black dude who loves to be half naked and to get jiggy with it. Comic gold, I tell ya!
“Let’s go surfin’ now
Everybody’s learning how
Come on and safari with me”
The one thing that saves “Blue Crush” from being completely worthless is the inspired casting. As Stockwell told Entertainment Weekly, “Big breasts generally get in the way of surfing, so a lot of these surfing girls are just tall and lean and really cut and just a different kind of physicality, which I found really interesting”. Interesting indeed. Kate Bosworth is an athletic blonde with a blue eye and a brown eye, which is really cute, Michelle Rodriguez (who played a boxer in “Girlfight”) is really fit and hard looking and Sanoe Lake is a tall half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian beauty. But even the girls’ combined charms can’t stop “Blue Crush” from being a dead in the water dud.