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STUDIO: MGM Video & DVD
MSRP: $18.99
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Get Wet featurette
Run For Your Life featurette
Back To The Beach music video
The Pitch
The ocean floor is much deeper than the plot.
The Humans
Chris Carmack, Laura Vandervoort, David Anders, Marsha Thomason, Mircea Monroe, Michael Graziadei, Audrina Partridge.
The Nutshell
Dive bum, Sebastian (Carmack), and his girl Friday, Dani (Vandervoort) run a struggling diving charter service in Honolulu and receive the charter of their young lives when a rich British couple, Carlton and Azra (Anders, Thomason), hire them for the week to look for a sunken treasure. But Sebastian and Dani quickly discover that they’re in over their heads when the Carlton and Azra aren’t who they claim to be and what they’re really looking for is something even far more dangerous.
The Lowdown
Considering how Stephen Herek started off, with such films as Critters, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Three Musketeers and Mr. Holland’s Opus, it’s kind of a downer to see him ostensibly in Director’s Jail with recent TV and direct-to-DVD titles such as Young MacGyver, Dead Like Me: Life After Death and now Into The Blue 2: The Reef. The guy has ability, but I guess he still hasn’t quite recovered from Holy Man yet. It’s mostly due to him that this direct-to-DVD sequel from the 2005 Paul Walker / Jessica Alba skinfest isn’t quite the ancillary dreck it would have been, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that great either.
If you saw the first film, then you’ve seen this one, because the circumstances are pretty much exactly repeated. Dive bum who has dreams of being something more than a dive bum and girlfriend who looks great in a bikini get caught up in illegal shenanigans and have to find a way out before they take one way dives to Davy Jones’ locker. In this case it’s Chris Carmack and Laura Vandervoort. Neither actor has the prowess of their predecessors, which is especially evident in Carmack’s case, but they are serviceable and look good mostly naked. David Anders and Marsha Thomason also fill out their bad guy roles fairly well. The film does have some gorgeous cinematography, and Herek keeps the story mostly coherent and even fleshes out supporting roles well.
There’s plenty of the requisite skin and underwater shots, but the lack of budget compared to the original is also apparent. They couldn’t even afford to mock up a partially sunken Spanish galleon underwater. Into the Blue 2 would rate a rental and that’s about it.
The Package
The cover artwork looks pretty much like the latest Calvin Klein ad, but I didn’t even get a close up look as I just got the generic white DVD sleeve with screener inside. There are a couple of featurettes, a standard “making of” and one on the underwater production behind-the-scenes. There’s also a music video.