Hot gals, hot guys, hot drugs, hot pirate treasure, hot Bahamas. Jessica Alba, Paul Walker, Scott Caan and Ashley Scott are the comely stars of a tropical action flick with enough dead space to let you think about what these actors will be doing 25 years from now. 1:45 (intense sequences of action violence, drug material, some sexual content and language). At indiscriminating area theaters everywhere.
With “Into the Blue,” John Stockwell completes a triad of films involving impossibly pretty young white women in love and in trouble. In “crazy/beautiful,” a gorgeous rich girl swoons for a poor Latino hunk. In “Blue Crush,” a curvaceous surfer babe dives for a gorgeous football stallion.
In the last of his “Into the Beautiful Blue Crush” trilogy, the pin-up-able Jessica Alba plays a shark handler who cuddles with hottie ocean salvager Paul Walker amid the crystalline shores of the Bahamas.
That triple-threat combination alone was probably enough to get major financing for this action/romance bonbon for armchair nitwits. As a bonus, someone tossed in a plot that has Alba and Walker up to their neck in bad news when they turn up a mother lode of sunken pirate treasure and cocaine in a single diving foray.
The scrupulously moral couple wants nothing to do with the illicit powdered cargo they discover inside a crashed plane. But Walker’s reckless attorney buddy (short blond Scott Caan) and his trashy pickup girlfriend (tall blond Ashley Scott) drag them into the thick of a grim narcotics trafficking world that adheres to a quaintly retro division of labor, whereby white folks make the big money while black folks do the dirty work.
The listless first half of “Into the Blue” is like looking at a vulgar picture postcard that has had the “Greetings from Nassau” scratched off so as not to distract from the half-naked models. There is much fantasy-island activity that finds the women in the scantiest of bikinis and the men in knee-length swim trunks, splashing about with all manner of ocean life.
The sharks appear to be benign, for a change, but it turns out they merely have a selective appetite for blackguards and reprobates. A lot of red runs into the blue during the bloodstained climax, which is just rowdy and violent enough to stir the attention of audience members who may have been lost in text messaging for the first 90 minutes.
There are no significant characters over the age of 35 to blight the film’s illusory sense of life as an eternal spring break. If movies could smell, “Into the Blue” would reek of coconut tanning oil.
BY JAN STUART, STAFF WRITER
www.newsday.com
