MOVIE REVIEWS

**Into the Blue doesn't break new ground, but it's a solid thriller with a fun cast, a suspenseful story, and worth a watch.** Into the Blue is best known for capitalizing on the popularity of its attractive stars to promote this low-budget movie. Still, if you actually take the time to watch the film, you will find a solid thriller complete with treasure hunting, shark attacks, plot twists, drug lords, and more. Paul Walker and Jessica Alba excel as a young couple in love living off of small jobs in the Bahamas with dreams of running their own salvage rig one day. But their hunt for treasure intertwines with a drug runner's efforts to recover a lost shipment. The stakes keep rising higher and higher as sharks attack and trusted colleagues turn out to be not so trustworthy. Into the Blue's exciting and suspenseful treasure hunt might just be a hidden treasure of its own with the right expectations.

Well I think the poster says it all, and if it's eye candy you are looking for then for the first hour or so neither Paul Walker nor Jessica Alba are going to disappoint. That comes later when they have to put their clothes on and do some acting with this far-fetched hybrid of drug smuggling and wreck-diving. It's the latter activity that convinces these two along with "Bryce" (Scott Caan) and "Amanda" (Ashley Scott) that their fortunes could be made. Snag is, you can't just raise tons of ancient booty from the sea bed and sail into harbour with it. What's this to do with drugs? Well we know from the preamble that a plane has crashed, and that it contains a great deal of cocaine. Guess what? Yep, they find it. Initially wanting nothing to do with it, they later conclude that they ought to try and sell it - and that brings them into conflict with "Bates" (Josh Brolin) who wants to have his cake and eat it! As the pace quickens, there now ensues loads of action-packed shenanigans in and out of the water. It's not the worst, indeed the last twenty minutes (allowing for some fairly obvious CGI) is actually quite an exciting sequence that allows everyone to get wet and bothered - and you'd better be able to tell the difference between a Tiger shark and a tuna fish. Brolin makes for quite a decent baddy, Caan - well he probably ought to be called Caan't, and the two on the poster show us that beautiful people still have a place on the small screen.