An elaborate excuse to show cool extreme sports in great style and a huge waste of potential.

Rating: 6/10 (19 January 2016)

Well this film had everything (almost everything) to be a great action film. The premise is far from being new, but i could generate a million different plots and stories, some of the most beautiful settings ever seen on screen, super cool thrilling extreme sports, and millions of opportunities to make the most daring thrilling action scenes ever made. But... It just didn't happen.
This film is truly a wonder, why? Because it has one of the most beautiful cinematography and visuals ever, a 105 million budget, and at the some time a b movie feel.
The film has a ton of mesmerizing settings around the world, that provide endless opportunities for thrilling action, and yes the film has great action scenes, but they are overall wasted because the director doesn't seem to know how to dramatize the action. The camera moves and shots never really take advantage of the action, and while i usually hate the lack of big shots in action films, here i hate the lack of close ups, since most of the time you never know who you are watching. The action feels too cold and many times, rushed.
A great example of this is the opening of the film, which is really disappointingly lackluster.Characters die unceremoniously without a touch of drama. It all feels like a bunch of things happening, The best action scene probably is the surf one, really great, but then again it could be so much more.
As i said, the cinematography is stunning, i think i never saw this kind of style. Then the visual effects are really amazing, they look super real. But the editing is quite bad. The continuity is awkward, rushed, feels like there's parts missing. Most of the action scenes for example are too short because its like this thing, that thing, instead of a continuous scene of things. Then the sound mixing is terrible, there's some good effects, like the waves, but everything mixed, the dialogue, the score, the music, the effects, seems weird.
The voices are like voice over, with a strange auto tune effect. It seems like everyone just recorded their dialogue in a studio and then someone just placed that recordings on top of everything. The music choices are weird. But the most disappointing thing, to my surprise, was the score by junkie XL. It is probably the most out of tone, out of place score i have ever seen. Its like he made the score without seeing the film. And the score is not bad on its own, but it is nothing more that a rehash of Hans Zimmer's scores, like inception and man of steel, but without the things that made them what they are, and with a ton o cheese, and the volume upped 1000x all the time.
And the script, which is by far the worst of this film. There's almost no plot, but the one there is could be great, but i wasn't. It's just something cool to show cool extreme sports. The dialogue is not a total disaster, but like its script is right there on the verge and you wonder how someone can write this and think its good. And there's some very weird moments. The end is also so strange!
The cast is what it is, and they do the best they can with what they have, and the two leads are fine, but the film could have benefited from some bigger talent.
The film has great style, which is the best it has to offer, with some good action scenes, but they never live up to their potential. There's almost zero drama or thrills, because this is nothing more than an elaborate excuse to show extreme sports. The frustrating part is that behind the elaborate excuse stands a huge potential for a great, thrill ride, filled with high octane drama. A good writer and director would have done wonders with all this ingredients. Truly a waste of potential.