Into the Blue (2005)

Originally Reviewed
  Thursday March 2, 2006

What can I possibly say about Into The Blue... well surprisingly enough I actually enjoyed the film. Put all the negatives aside and simply take the film for what it is or what it's trying to be and you have a rather entertaining action / adventure film.

Into The Blue is a simple film. Paul Walker and Jessica Alba live on the clear coastal beaches of the Bahamas. Walker is trying to get enough money together to fix his raggedy old boat and go out "into the blue" and try his luck at salvaging some sunken treasure. Everything in their lives is peaceful until his loud mouth, no nonsense friend from New York and his druggie female companion, whom he picked up along the way, come to visit.

Walker’s friend, who is strangely enough supposed to be a lawyer, was given a boat and a nice place to stay by a client who owed him money but couldn't pay up. So the gang goes out into the ocean to look for treasure and discovers the remnants of a ship that could be a mythical pirate ship. They also discover a crashed airplane packed full of cocaine and three dead bodies... they now have a problem. If they tell the police the area will be swarmed and there will be no chance of them returning to the sunken ship. What they have to do is find some evidence that identifies the ship, so they are able to stake a claim.

Everything is going good until the druggie girl gets a hankering for some crack-o-rama and convinces Walker's buddy to go down to the plane and bring some of the stuff up, sell it and use the money to buy the machinery they need to excavate the sunken ship. Unfortunately they end up trying to sell the drugs to the guys that originally lost the drugs in the first place... big mistake!

Into The Blue turns out to be a very entertaining adventure that offers a lot of action and surprisingly a few good "cringe" moments, especially the shark attacks, including a scene where they actually show a large chunk taken out of someone’s leg! It's been quite a while since a film has been made about searching for sunken treasure, and I have always been fascinated by programs on the Discovery channel that follow treasure seekers around, usually you get sucked into the adventure and they never find anything. Not so in this film, although the problem that does arise is there isn't a whole a lot to do with this kind of story and therefore it ends up turning into long scenes of underwater swimming.

While the story tends to be rather drug out at times, a few other factors really weigh the film down. The acting pretty sub-par, personally I think it has to do with the fact that the script was poorly written, they decided to turn this film into more of a teen flick than a film that people of all ages might enjoy. This can be seen by the character's slang, which gets very old, two guys that are in there late twenties and one guy that is supposed to be a lawyer and he's talking like he's an 18 year old high school student in LA, sorry but I don't buy it! Jessica Alba's performance is average, she's really only in the film to complement the beautiful ocean surroundings, and doesn't provide a whole lot of dialogue which is probably for the better.

In the end, Into The Blue is an average action film that could have been better overall had the film been condensed down to eliminate the extended waste, and a script that wasn't written by a high school student. Overall, it’s worth a rent if you watch this film without thinking, and just enjoy the tropical scenery and the action.

7/10