Into the Blue

For some reason, we seem to be encountering a lot of movies the recently deceased actor, Paul Walker, made that weren’t part of the Fast and Furious franchise. This was much better than I had expected. He is an unsuccessful salvage guy in the Bahamas, who stumbles on a fantastic two-for-one site: the rotting remains of the treasure ship Zephyr, very close to the recently crashed hulk of a DC-3 carrying a huge shipment of cocaine. Either one of them could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but each has a problem. You don’t want to mess with the coke because it will surely be owned by some very bad people. And if you can’t document the ship, the Bahamian government will confiscate it all.

Naturally he gets in big trouble, almost all of it caused by the greed of the sort of old friend you wish you didn’t have, a brash lawyer played by Scott Caan (the son of James Caan). The underwater photography is first-rate, really superior stuff, and the CGI sharks are so well done that it was almost possible to believe they were real. (Well, some of them were, but you can’t get a real shark to turn on cue and attack someone.) Walker’s character is resourceful and smart. He does the right thing most of the time, and so does his girlfriend, Jessica Alba, who doesn’t sit around being a hostage, but really brings it to the scumbags who have captured her. Nothing is done here that is flat-out impossible for a human being to do, though some of it is unlikely. It is also clear that not much of it was done by stunt performers, too. Walker was a diving enthusiast, and it shows. He knows what he’s doing. Bottom line: It never insulted my intelligence, and that’s really saying something for a movie like this these days.