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"Open Water 2: Adrift"
DVD
Feeling happy? Downright
gleeful? Like someone reached down and tickled the very depths
of your soul? Want to fix that? Because if you've been feeling
entirely too happy for entirely too long, "Open Water 2:
Adrift" is guaranteed to make you look twice at that bottle
of bleach in the cabinet.
"Open Water 2:
Adrift", you see, is "based on true events". After
watching it, I couldn't help but wonder why they'd want to admit
that these "true events" had even taken place, let alone
announce to the world just how monumentally stupid they were,
even in part.
And it's not just the
fact that a halfway decent suspense thriller like "Open Water"
crapped out to this bit of direct to video sorrow sludge, it's
what "Open Water 2: Adrift" has to offer in the first
place. Basically, six friends and one baby (the daughter of two
of the friends) are off for a weekend cruise on a luxury yacht.
And since this movie isn't called "Open Water 2: Happy Smile
Fun Cruise", you know some truly horrible stuff is going
to happen. Mostly, six morons are going to get hammered, go for
a swim out in the middle of nowhere, and forget to lower the ladder.
They're now outside of the boat while the lone baby on board,
who clearly isn't pulling her weight--surely she could crawl to
the ladder release controls and lower it down for mom and dad!--stays
on board crying because Mommy and Daddy are currently freezing
to death in the water about ten feet below deck.
Okay, so I'm oversimplifying.
Not everyone's THAT drunk--indeed, Mommy is a hydrophobe from
a ways back and would only go on board wearing a life jacket.
She didn't want to go swimming, really, but was unavoidably thrown
overboard. But still--there's five morons and one victim in that
water.
And watching them try
to get back on board is both depressing and...oh hell, it's just
depressing. Watching them try the most idiotic things--like grabbing
for an American flag hanging off a pole on the rearward deck,
thinking somehow that this particular flag was woven from a combination
of very thin cotton and STEEL FIBERS--will just depress the hell
out of you.
The first "Open
Water" was a weird set of accidents that left me feeling
bad for the two involved, and frankly, hoping that they'd get
back to land just so they could sue holy hell out of the boating
company that got them into that mess in the first place. The second
"Open Water", meanwhile, is a perfect storm of sheer
balls-out stupidity that left me feeling bad for the baby on the
boat that had to get saddled with this kind of second-rate crew.
Okay, yeah, for those poor schmucks in the water, too...I guess
anyone could pull that kind of bonehead mistake. But just watching
these guys squabble amongst themselves and try a couple futile
things (including waving for help toward a passing ship, who of
course believes they're just out partying) is just really, really
sad. Because when you're neck deep in water, and can't reach the
boat, the last thing you expect to see is someone die of an untreated
skull fracture.
Yeah, a bit of a spoiler
there, but you just won't believe the kind of sheer stupidity
these six get themselves into. The panoply of injuries they develop
over the course of this whole sorry mess is just astonishing.
It's all so preventable, and if they had just for God's sake worked
TOGETHER for a little bit they might well have gotten themselves
back on the boat without incident or injury! But no...it's back-and-forth:
arguing, stupid stunt, lame joke, more arguing, really stupid
stunt, really stupid overreaction, a couple deaths, still more
arguing, and so on.
The ending won't even
manage to be a happy one--it's an even bigger downer than the
entire movie itself. And even better, it'll leave you screaming
at your TV in sheer disbelief as your brain tries to reconcile
how they could manage to overlook something so simple as all that.
The special features
include a making-of featurette, Spanish and English subtitles,
and trailers for "Open Water", "Dead in the Water",
"Man About Town", and "Peaceful Warrior".
All in all, this massive
cinematic buzzkill is really only worthwhile if you're desperate
to feel sad, or have some kind of monster, semipermanent mania
going on that you don't want a pharmaceutical cure for. The rest
of us who have come to enjoy feeling happy should cut a wide berth
around this nautical angstfest.
Open
Water 2: Adrift
*
DVD
Directed by Hans Horn
Written by Adam Kreutner, Dave Mitchell
Starring Susan May Pratt, Richard Speight Jr., Niklaus Lange,
Ali Hillis
Produced by Philip Schulz Deyle, Dan Maag
94 mins
R
2007
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