It’s a rare but comforting truth that a certain breed of film’s strength lies in its lack of ambition, its disregard for plausibility and its dedication to the purity of formula. Into The Blue will linger in your memory no longer than the beat of an eyelash, but is a B-grade joy as deep-tanned and sun-kissed as a Club Tropics promo.
Thus we get Alba’s golden bod barely muzzled by her designer bikini as she portrays the morally-inclined love interest of Walker’s diving fanatic, whose bronzed pecs are, frankly, giving a much better performance than he is. They discover the drug haul, fret a bit, then discover a mythical pirate wreck and fret some more as to whether to come clean but give away the sacred salvage rights. Naturally, Scott Caan plays his loose-hinged best mate who forces the issue by trying to offload the coke. Enter drug dealers, screen left. Enter ravenous sharks, screen right. Yeesh!
Give director John Stockwell his due — Into The Blue’s gloriously silly, boasts crystal-clear underwater photography and musters a tidy bit of tension at the end. Any movie that features a school of coked-up sharks is not taking itself too seriously — and those locations are to die for.
