Into the Blue (2005) - Movie Review

Jessica Alba in a bikini should be enough to make any movie worth seeing, but director John Stockwell tries his best to counter such qualities. "Into the Blue" is a lackluster suspense film that gets better toward the end but struggles for the first hour and a half.

The movie has several things going against it: 1. Paul Walker. 2. It is boring. Going for it: 1. Treasure hunting. 2. Drug smugglers. 3. Jessica Alba in a bikini. The movie features Walker and Alba as a boyfriend/girlfriend duo who live in a tropical paradise. When they discover a sunken ship with a fortune waiting to be found, their eyes turn to gold. But with a sunken plane nearby full of cocaine and a group of drug smugglers looking for their lost product, the heroes fall into a web of deceit and danger. Of course, this is all in the last half hour. The rest of the movie is boring, boring, boring.

For the first hour and a half, Alba, Walker, Scott Caan and Ashley Scott swim a lot and look good, but little happens in terms of action and suspense - generally something required for an action-suspense film. The movie looks great, but, just like Stockwell's "Blue Crush," lacks the content to back up his picture-perfect visuals.

Thankfully, the film does improve in the last few hours as we get into some action scenes, and the movie actually gets surprisingly bloody in a few parts. If "Into the Blue" had gotten going about an hour earlier, it could have been something - instead, we have to settle for a waste-of-time flick.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.