Ugly Americans aboard

Rating: 4/10 (12 February 2000)

Following in the sandals of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Hollywood's latest foray into the lives of people on perpetual vacation is "The Beach."
This film could be worse, but it would have to work at it. Leo DiCaprio tries hard, but he isn't really given much to work WITH here. He is a character without motivation amid a cast of characters without motivation.
Each and every person on this mythical island seems to have been born the day they got there. None of them even have last names, much less lives. That makes it a little hard for the audience to care whether they live or die, much less find the perfect beach upon which to squander their time.
DiCaprio's character in particular is an annoying,whinny, whimp who seems as unlikely a figure to build a film around as any I've ever seen. And those are the characteristics he starts off with. By the end of the film, you think everyone would have been better off had he expired on the swim to the island.
But the real disappointment is Virginie Ledoyen. When will good French actresses learn that coming to America gets them nothing but a chance to wave at the Statue of Liberty? Ledoyen, who has done some great work in France, essentially gets to do nothing on "The Beach," except look fetching in a bikini. But she could have taken the flight straight through to Tahiti and walked around in one of those.
In the end, this was a waste of a lot of good acting talent on a typical, pointless Hollywood project that could not have been made in the first place without the participation of that talent.