WHITE SQUALL (31)

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Caroline Goodall, Scott Wolf

The Pitch: Life at sea aboard an "educational ship" for rich teenagers, culminating in a fatal shipwreck.

Theo Sez: A sea story, perhaps the first since THE BOUNTY thirteen years ago - not just an adventure in a shipboard setting (like the excellent DEAD CALM) but actually about the character-building harshness of life at sea ; unfortunately there's a whole bunch of cliches stowed away in the hold. There's the tough kid who's actually dyslexic and just crying out for help, and the sensitive kid who's afraid to climb the rigging because he's traumatised by his brother's death (he fell from a tree but hey, it's the same principle) ; there's the tough-but-fair skipper, a True Sailor who communes with the waves and says things like "Behold, the power of the wind!", gazing out to sea with the grim smile of one who has Felt Her Cold Embrace ; there's hokey caramaderie and a big specious climax out of DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Hard to say why such a big-budget, big-talent movie should allow such lazy scripting, but presumably the answer lies in the climactic storm sequence (the "white squall" itself), an FX-man's dream which clearly means to be the definitive storm-at-sea sequence in the way that TWISTER meant to show the definitive movie tornados. As in that film, story and characters are irrelevant to the film-makers - they can do them all right, it's just not what they signed up for. If they'd only remembered to cut out all the perfunctory "dramatic" bits and make it a straight action movie, they might actually have had a hit on their hands.