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Blue Crush Review By Shawn McKenzie 08/31/2002 I will admit it. When I first saw trailers for Blue Crush, I thought it was going to be Coyote Ugly with surfboards. I thought it was going to be eye candy with no substance. I was very wrong in my perception of this movie. Blue Crush is the story of Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), a girl living in Hawaii who has been surfing all her life. She is raising her little surfer sister Penny (Mika Boorem) because their mother has walked out on them. In between catching waves, she works as a maid at a resort hotel with her two friends Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake), also a couple of surfers. One day Anne Marie becomes disgusted at the sloppy state of a room she’s cleaning and scolds the guest of the room, a football player named Leslie (Faison Love.) One of Leslie’s teammates, a quarterback named Matt Tollman (Matthew Davis) witnesses this scolding and becomes attracted to Anne Marie. The scolding results in her being fired. After watching her surf, Matt comes up to her, apologizes for his teammate, and asks if she’d be willing to teach him how to surf. She shrugs it off until her friends point out that he is a rich football player who might pay nicely for lessons. Anne Marie, her sister, and her friends then start giving surfing lessons. She starts to fall in love with Matt, but Eden doesn’t like that because it is keeping her from her training for the Rip Masters surfing competition, something that a female surfer has never won. Anne Marie has to decide on what path she wants to go down.The thing that separates Blue Crush from Coyote Ugly is the seriousness that the movie gives its subject. This is no Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon movie. The surfing in this movie is impressive. The cinematography of the waves and the action is beautiful. They don’t try to dumb down the lingo for the non-surfer audience. There is one shot at the end (after the big climax of the movie) that looked a little fake, but otherwise, it is very visually impressive. The acting is decent, if a little hokey at times. I really want to see Michelle Rodriguez in more lead roles, but she is fine here. Kate Bosworth is a newcomer that will be interesting to watch in the future. I found out that John Stockwell, the man who directed Blue Crush, also directed Crazy/Beautiful. That was another movie that looked like eye candy from the trailer and ended up being decent. I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend going to see it in the theater, especially if surfing doesn’t really appeal to you, but if it does, you will be in for a treat.
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