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A few movies do deserve reconsideration after that first disastrous viewing. You come across them again after a few years—ones that you feel you should’ve liked better than you remember—and you can’t help but think: “What was the problem? Maybe, who knows, it’ll be better this time around.” That is to say: It’s a crapshoot.

I remember going to see The Big Lebowski in the theater and being bitterly disappointed in it as the follow-up to Fargo, more Raising Arizona than the Austin-set Blood Simple. However, in the years since then each repeated viewing has led me to like it even more than the time before.  On the other hand, some movies just don’t work and never get any better no matter how many years go by before giving them another chance: The Doors (along with most Oliver Stone movies from the last twenty-five years), Angel Heart, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. With these movies—ones that should’ve been better than they were but went horrendously off the rails for whatever reasons—watching them again is at best a postmortem of failed opportunity as opposed to real entertainment.

I had all this in mind—it could go either way—rewatching Blue Crush when it recently showed up on Netflix.

Blue Crush is the story of Anne Marie Chadwick (Kate Bosworth), her two friends Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake), and her little sister Penny (Mika Boreem), all surfers in Hawaii. Anne Marie is just days away from the Pipe Masters surfing competition where she’ll have her last chance to go pro and/or pick up sponsors after a near-drowning incident three years earlier at—surprisingly?—the very same beach. Along the way she deals with losing her job as a maid at a local high-rise resort hotel, tries to wrangle her sister’s increasingly wild behavior since their absentee mother is in Vegas with her newest boyfriend, and navigates a budding romance with NFL quarterback Matt Tollman (Matthew Davis), who’s in town for the Pro Bowl.

I remember the buzz leading up to the release of the movie in the summer of 2002: It was finally going to be the surfing movie we’d all been waiting for—realizing the promise of Endless Summer with none of the maudlin testosterone-driven angst of Big Wednesday—and with girl surfers to boot! And for the first thirty minutes or so it was all working pretty well as the surfer girls and their daily lives in paradise are introduced along killer surfing cinematography with an inside-out psychedelic point of view. After that, though, at the point Anne Marie meets quarterback Matt and relents in giving him surf lessons, the movie goes sideways, never to recover.

Actually, that’s not the case. Unbeknownst to me on my initial viewing, the first hint that something has gone awry appears during the opening credit sequence when we learn the movie is “based on” an Susan Orlean article from Women Outside, variously titled “Surfers Girls of Maui,” “The Maui Surfer Girls,” and “Life’s Swell,” which is immediately followed by a “story credit” for Lizzy Weiss. And therein lies the rub: the “story.” I’d never read the original article by Orlean but it’s available online so I decided to take a look. It’s a slice of life piece detailing a group surfer girls who live in the remote Hawaiian seaside village of Hana and are getting ready for an upcoming competition. As such, there is no “story” per se other than showing how a unique set of intersecting circumstances—talent, geography, desire—have led them to the wave-based lives they lead. However, while that might make an interesting enough surfing documentary—and, hey, we’ve already got plenty of those!—it’s doesn’t have the kind of narrative arc demanded by an actual story. Hence, the imposition of Lizzy Weiss’ “story.”

It’s not so much a story, though, as an amalgam of romance/sports tropes rehashed onscreen:

• Is Matt’s affection real or will Anne Marie just be his Pro Bowl vacation story of how he learned to surf?
• Can she overcome the fear from almost drowning three years earlier or will it foil her comeback?
• Is it possible for people from different worlds to really fall in love?
• Will she prove the girls can do it just as well as the guys by being the first female surfer on the cover of Surfing magazine?
• Can the football wives/girlfriends ever accept her as a real person as opposed to a convenient throwaway flavor of the week?
• Will the locals be able to cheer on one of their own to a success that transcends their own local beaches?

The only thing missing was the necessity to win the surfing competition to either keep someone’s house from being repossessed or pay for a life-or-death operation.

The other biggest issue is the two romantic leads: Bosworth and Davis. There is absolutely no chemistry between the two of them and it’s just painful when they’re together, kind of like watching someone kiss their cousin. At best, Bosworth, in what was meant to be her breakout role, plays a character who is equal parts shrill and vapid, making this one of the least interesting parts in the movie. For somebody who is supposed to want a lot, there’s nothing more than the most token displays of drive, desire, or sacrifice. The least interesting person in the movie, though, is Davis, who exhibits all the milquetoast charm and charisma of a sodden roll of paper towels. Why should we have expected more, however, given that his career “highlight” in the subsequent thirteen years is the Twilight-knockoff TV series The Vampire Diaries?

That is to say, both Bosworth and Davis are completely overshadowed by their supporting cast. Michelle Rodriguez, only two years removed from her star-making turn in Girlfight, once again displays the kind of intensity that easily outshines her female lead. And Sanoe Lake, an actual surfer, plays her part with an easy verisimilitude sorely lacking in Bosworth. As the NFL quarterback, Davis is outperformed in every scene he’s in with the Pro Bowl offensive lineman Leslie (Faizon Love). Something as simple as giving Rodriguez and Love the lead roles would have at least given the movie a chance to elevate itself above its spin-the-wheel plot points but, c’mon, we all know there was no chance of that as opposed to the white-bread, cookie-cutter actors designed to attract the largest multiplex audience possible.

Original rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Current rating: unchanged

Mark Long