Beautiful to look at, painful to watch

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2004)

`Blue Crush' is about something new in the world of commercial sports: female surfers. Everything is popping up 'extreme' these days, and while female surfers are not new to the world at large, they are new to the pop landscape. `Blue Crush' takes this interesting idea and strands it in a pedestrian storyline with nice performances, passable special effects, and beautiful cinematography and stunt work.
Three friends living on Hawaii's North Shore are determined to make it big and be the first women on the cover of Surfing magazine. The best of the three, Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), recently wiped out and got sucked under, getting slammed into the razor-sharp coral reef. Since then, she has not been the same surfer. Right off the bat, we've moved into the valley of the banal.
She and her friends Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake) work as maids at an upscale hotel. There Anne Marie meets and falls for Matt (Matthew Davis), an football player visiting the island with his team, which seems to be made up of a handful of African-American guys who try to give the movie 'flava' by yelling a lot and cramming a fat guy into a Speedo. Anne Marie gets fired after yelling at the Speedo boys for leaving used condoms lying around, and she begins to practice hard for a big upcoming surfing competition.
Bosworth, as Anne Marie, gives a nice little performance. All that is really required of the girls is to look good in bikinis (Rodriguez especially suffers playing an underwritten tough girl), but Bosworth comes up with a little more. We root for her because we genuinely like her, and it's Bosworth that makes this happen, not the script.
That script is a little paint-by-numbers deal, throwing in a little of everything but never focusing on one issue long enough to explore it. Anne Marie is looked down on by male surfers, Matt distracts her from her goal, money is tight among the girls, the island boys beat up Matt for being a mainlander and surfing in a private spot with Anne Marie...each little crisis is introduced and completed in about five minutes. No one has a person to play, just a collection of lines.
Which is unfortunate, because the cinematography (by David Hennings) and editing (by Emma Hickox) are nothing short of spectacular. You have never seen a surfing movie that looks like this (assuming you've ever seen a surfing movie). The camera goes above the water, under the water, inside the curls, and on the boards as it prowls the beach. The water is beautiful, and Hennings pulls off camera tricks no one has ever seen before. Digitally pasting the actress' faces over the women who did the actual surfing is sometimes fake and distracting, but the actresses seemed to do a lot of the surfing, and the women who filled in for the tough stuff did a great job. Hickox weaves it all together dazzlingly; this film is a joy to look at. It's too bad that listening to it is so painful.
This movie will no doubt entrance girls of all ages. While I can't recommend the movie based on the story, I can and will recommend the amazing visuals. It's just too bad that the real world of female surfers didn't get a movie that did them justice.