In For A Penny… Honesty In Advertising

A certain publication that I hadn't worked for in this capacity asked me to review a film this week.

I imagine they wont be asking again. The film was Open Water and this is the unprintable review...... fair enough really.

Open Water

Open Water was heralded around the world as the new Blair Witch Project, and after riding in on the wave of such hype has managed to deeply disappoint audiences everywhere.

Not this reviewer though.

Such a billing as ‘Next Blair Witch’ was enough to let me know what I was in for; cheap production values, artificial suspense, hammy characterisation, and sweet fuck all actually happening in an overlong movie malnourished of content.

Deep breath time. The scenario is easy enough, and based on a true occurrence – the leaving behind of a couple from a dive trip in shark-infested waters.

This is all the movie is – a quick scattershot approach at characterisation at the beginning where all the clichés of money-rich time-poor successful American power couple types are wheeled out, then the being on the Island and then the being left behind.

How it ends for them cannot be divulged because the resolution of that question is the only thing likely to keep you in your seat as this thoroughly dislikeable couple bob in the water for a full two-thirds of the film.

I’d tell you their names or their jobs or their hopes or their dreams, but I can’t. I really just didn’t care enough to write them down. Never a good sign for a character driven dialogue film.
After so much time with such disagreeable characters, seeming as they do to have fallen out of a bad bad bad Starbucks commercial, one thing you can say is that you hope some sharks turn up quick.

The only shining lights in a film rife with poor camerawork, repetitive suspense techniques that lose their punch somewhat after the fourth outing, paint-by-numbers scene setting, secondary characters so obvious that they may as well have had cardboard cut-outs with signs on them denoting their roles and all the rest of the problems in this overlong undergood film is that the dive instructor was alright.

Really, that is about the best to be said of this film that plods through its excessively obvious and formulaic first third into a devastatingly boring ending.

But then again if you liked the Blair Witch Project maybe you deserve to see this film.

anyone else feel like getting the worst-tempered reviewer in the world on board - I quite enjoyed demolishing a film..........

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Posted by Simon Pound to In for a penny..... at 11/24/2004 05:05:04 PM.

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