by Peter Morris in Los Angeles on April 2 2003
OK let’s start out by stating I am probably not the target audience for a film about teenage girls struggling to get recognition in the male dominated, and surprisingly tough world of surfing. But, having said that I really quite enjoyed it! It wasn’t so much the camaraderie stuff of all girls sticking together in the face of adversity which, let‘s be honest , crops up in a variety of ways in any film involving teenage girls but rather the fact that the actors are all relatively unknown and did a good job. What‘s more the surfing scenes are all real and as good as any I’ve ever seen in a feature film.
The plot, in a nutshell, is that Anne-Marie (played by KATE BOSWORTH “The Horse Whisperer”, “Remember the Titans”) has been left in charge of her younger sister Penny by her Mum who’s run off with her latest boyfriend du jour. This is not the first time this has happened so she now shares with her sister and her two best friends, Eden ( MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ - “Girlfight”, “The Fast and The Furious”) and Lena (SANOE LAKE - a former model). All of the girls have grown up on the North Shore of Oahu - the Mecca of the Surfing world- and Anne-Marie has more talent than most or at least she did have until she nearly drowned after a wipe out in her last competition.
The big question is can she get her bottle back to do it all again in a major tournament while dealing with the distractions of: her rebellious younger sister: holding down a maid‘s job at a local hotel, and the amorous advances of the quarterback of a visiting professional American football team (MATT DAVIS - “Legally Blonde”, “ Urban Legend- Final Cut”, “Tigerland”)?
Well, you’ll have to watch it to find that out, but I will say even the love story wasn’t dealt with badly and had a lot of positives where it could have been really tacky - but the surfing scenes are what make this film worth seeing.
SANOE LAKE who plays Lena is a Hawaiian native and knew her way around the surf scene while the other girls did a sort of “boot camp” learning from scratch and should be commended on their work. Many of the spectacular scenes feature local surfers working on screen for the first time and a few professional surfers appear as themselves in the competition scenes. And the film makers proudly boast that not one scene was shot in a tank or using visual effects- everything you see was done “live” on location which makes it an even more commendable achievement.
I was pleasantly surprised by it watching in Sunny Southern California - on a cold day in Blighty it’ll have the double benefit of making you feel like you’ve had an hour or two at the beach!
And if you‘re a teenager you may enjoy it even more but I‘ll give it.......6.5 out of 10
UK Release: 4th April 2003
Celebrities Worldwide Rating: 6.5 out of 10
David Jensen Photography:
https://www.davidjensen.co.uk/
