Very Cool!!!

Dreadfully Boring

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Anne Marie Chadwick (Kate Bosworth) is a local surfer girl with best friends Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake) aiming to surf the Pipe in competition. Her little sister Penny (Mika Boorem) is getting more rebellious especially when their mother leaves town. She struggles against testosterone driven surf culture, and her disgusting job as a hotel maid. However the arrival of pro football quarterback Matt Tollman (Matthew Davis) may distract her away from her goal.On the surface, this movie has beautiful babes in beautiful exotic locales. Beneath the surface, there is a compelling underdog story. It has emotions. She has to overcome her fears. Kate Bosworth is good as a girl unsure of herself. Rodriguez is the girl with attitude to spare. It's more than a simple exploitation film.

Some sports movies are about sports (Remember the Titans) some are about the people who play them (Girl Fight). Blue Crush makes a huge mistake of choosing the latter approach, and it asks the viewer to invest in a handful of characters who are largely under fleshed, and never amount to much more than bodies in bikini's or shorts. The story is choppy and lacks fluidity, resulting in rushed characterization, a lack of explanation, and worst of all, The movie is not very exiting.Blue Crush's sole effectiveness, is that director John Stockwell has designed some phenomenal shots. He is able to work the camera behind the waves, below them or up atop them, sometimes onto the surfboard itself. Blue Crush may have some effectiveness as a sea spectacle but it is a superficial one. It's a flimsy story about flimsy people, frequently predictable. Offering a few laughs and few smiles, in an otherwise bland motion picture.

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.

Good looking but ultimately routine surfing drama with 3 girl lead actors instead of guys.... offers more than it delivers mainly because there isn't a lot the producers can do with the material that hasn't been seen already in IN GODS HANDS or BIG Wednesday or even NORTH SHORE or Brit silliness BLUE JUICE or Australian travesties like LIQUID BRIDGE. In between great looking surf footage is the usual suburban TV level scenes in semi squalor, wild parties and teen arguments... or silly scenes in the workplace (hotel chambermaid scenes that are disgusting and just plain ugly....toilet bowls and condoms....ugh, yawn etc). Aimed squarely at teen audiences... primarily girls, and with the added butch aggro in the usual cranky performance by Michelle Rodriguez, there is absolutely nothing in this film for adults... sadly even those young adults in their 20s.