Into The Blue

The checkpoints of Into The Blue read like a 13-year-old's power fantasies.

Gorgeous sun-kissed locations, sumptuously toned and tanned bodies with acres of flesh on display (unsurprising, given director John Stockwell's last picture - Blue Crush) grace our eyes 90 per cent of the time. The rest is treasure hunting, drug running and sharks, coked up enough to kill Tony Montana. If this sounds like your thang, then stop reading this review, because I tired of the film around 20 minutes in.

Jared (Paul Walker) has dreams of becoming a real treasure hunter, while making ends meet by working as a diving instructor in the Bahamas. He is loved by Sam (Jessica Alba), who is morally "so clean she squeaks". They are joined by Bryce (Scott Caan), a less-scrupulous friend of Jared, and Amanda, his most recent squeeze, on the treasure scoop of a lifetime, the location of The Zephyr and it's billions in stolen booty. Just next door (figuratively speaking) to this find, is a drug lord's missing half ton of cocaine, just to complicate matters.

If ever a film was sold on the verisimilitude of it's poster, this is it. The appeal of the film is as obvious and as shallow as Alba-in-a-bikini and Walker's chiselled six-pack.

The film looks great; the underwater photography is as clear as a bell and digitally augmented with shoals of fish. The action set pieces are relatively well staged, but nearly everything you see has been done twice as well in much better movies.

The monotonous, exposition-heavy script sinks without a trace.

But hey! Know what? Let's leave it at that...