Film Reviews

Adrift

• Rating:
• Director: Hans Horn.
• Starring: Susan May Pratt, Richard Speight Jr., Eric Dane, Ali Hillis
• Details: US / 95mins (15A).

Reuniting for a weekend cruise on Dan's (Dane) luxurious yacht, a group of old friends, including married couple Amy (Pratt) and James's (Speight Jr.) new baby, look forward to a beautiful, relaxing cruise. Stopping off to enjoy the sun, the makeshift crew take a swim to cool off. As a joke, Dan lifts aqua-phobic Amy up over his shoulders and dives into the water. However, the joke turns into a nightmare as Dan didn't let the ladder down before he jumped in and now, with the yacht impossible to scale, they are stuck in the water with a hungry baby crying on board. Where do you start reviewing a movie like this? It's a sequel of a film that didn't need a sequel (but that doesn't matter these days) so you can't talk about the originality of the idea; you can't start talking about actors performances since everyone is stuck chin height in water for the duration; there is little or no action (no sharks this time, folks) to talk about apart from the sporadic bust up between themselves and the dialogue, which consists of "What will we do now?" grates very quickly. Infuriatingly only trying one idea once and then discarding it completely (although they do try a variation of one idea again), the characters are also too dumb to root for. There is a subtext that America is all lost at sea at the moment with Camelot just out of reach, and in case the audience don't get that, there are enough shots of a torn Stars And Stripes to get the message across. At the end of the day, there's no reason why a film like this exists.

Review by Gavin Burke