An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was directed by Curtis Hanson and Michael Apted, I thought I might as well check it out. For Curtis Hanson, this movie was a rather sad way to end an otherwise solid career. Indeed, Hanson actually didn’t manage to finish this movie for health reasons (Michael Apted had to take over and finish the damned thing) and the guy eventually even passed away a few years later. To make things worse, this final directing effort turned out to be a flop at the box-office. Well, I always had a weak spot for movies dealing with surfing and this one was probably one of the most convincing one I have seen. Indeed, it went fairly deep into explaining what you would need to learn to become really good at this sport. Indeed, you need skills but also some major physical and mental strength to become really successful. So, everything dealing with the surfing was actually quite interesting and pretty neat but, unfortunately, pretty much everything else was rather underwhelming though. I won’t blame Jonny Weston who was quite charismatic or even Gerard Butler who was not bad at all but there were just too many damned sub-plots. I mean, if they would have picked one (for example, the relationship between Jay and Kim), it could have worked fine but, instead, they kept constantly switching between various uninteresting little stories which had nothing do with surfing and which dragged down the whole thing. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.