Surfin' M.A.U.I.

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2009)

In 1977, Nik Cohn saw his now legendary magazine article 'Another Saturday Night', about young blue-collar dancers, reworked by Hollywood as Saturday Night Fever. Blue Crush also has journalistic origins, Susan Orlean's 'Surf Girls of Maui', another real-life soap opera concerning talented, underprivileged teens taking dead-end jobs to support their subculture.
Same route, different results: unlike Saturday Night Fever, with its gang wars and attempted rapes, the grittiest Blue Crush allows is a surfer-turned-chambermaid attempting to shake a hotel guest's discarded condom from the sole of her shoe.
Kate Bosworth stars as Anne Marie, a troubled surfer champ whose infatuation with a quarterback (a bland Davis) and lack of self-confidence threatens to scupper her chances of winning a forthcoming surfing contest.
Despite good intentions, Blue Crush never really rises above its formula. The surfing action, which might have redeemed such cheesy fare, suffers from a surfeit of over-familiar MTV-style editing. Also it's hard to feel any emotional engagement with the drama, while dismal dialogue, dangling plot threats and a wasted supporting cast (a sultry Sanoe Lake, a genuine surfer; Michelle Girlfight Rodriguez, from whom one jealous sneer speaks more volumes than a thousand pages of Barbie-gush) further let down a potentially subversive proposition.
On the plus side, there's some lovely shots of Hawaiian sunrises, if you're still undecided about cashing in those Air Miles.