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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 5.84%
Worth A Look: 32.47%
Average: 10.39%
Pretty Bad: 35.71%
Total Crap: 15.58%
11 reviews, 88 user ratings
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| Beach, The |
by Erik Childress
"You can see the audience click off about two-thirds in."
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What is it with these kids today? At least the kids in movies. Why are so many travelling to places like Bangkok for a vacation? Are they too good for Daytona Beach or even Hawaii? Do they think Bangkok is the foreign name for brothel? First there was Return to Paradise then there was the female remake Brokedown Palace. Now we’ve got The Beach, a beautifully looking if dramatically flat film that aspires to be a travelogue version of Fight Club and comes up way short.The Beach (**)
Leonardo DiCaprio plays a bored American backpacker, with enough money to be a world traveler, but never mind that because his name is Richard and that’s all we need to know about him, or so we’re told. After an encounter with a daffy guy named...Daffy…Leo recruits his hotel neighbors (French couple Francoise and ATM) to go on a trek to find an island paradise. What they find is a version of the Kurtz compound in Apocalypse Now after listening to a 24-hour loop of Shiny Happy People. They also find the equivalent of paradise for many youngsters – a gigantic field of marijuana plants. Paradise also includes the beautiful beach, the bluest of blue waters, fresh fish and volleyball games.
This is the commune that Leo has apparently been looking for all over – a group content to live with nature and not the conveniences of modern-day life. That doesn’t stop them from sending Leo on a beer run to pick up batteries and tampons though. They’re also not smart enough to stay out of the water after it becomes known that sharks tend to show up from time to time. The whole point to this cynicism is that the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the point is. Even the film’s ads suggest the island paradise is disrupted by the pirates from Six Days, Seven Nights, but such is really not the case as the marijuana farmers allow the commune to exist as long as they keep their Peter Rabbit asses out of their dope and don’t tell anymore people about the beach. His character’s only hate seems to be tourists, because even as bored as he is with the world around him, he still manages to bring along and play his Gameboy. Parallels can be drawn in the scene where he fails to immediately respond to a cry for help because he’s too busy playing a video game, but it doesn’t go very far to lend legitimacy to the character they’ve set up in the opening narration.
Much that has been written about this The Beach likens it to Lord of the Flies, The Blue Lagoon and homages to Apocalypse Now – but the film it most closely resembles is the underappreciated Harrison Ford/Peter Weir collaboration, The Mosquito Coast. Both films are about males who feel that the world in which they live in is dead in some metaphorical way. Ford’s character was about disappointment in the country he grew up in. Leo seems to be out of video games. Both characters end up packing their lives (or family) up in search of “paradise” in the jungle and both are how about they go mad and screw it up. And, boy, does Leo go mad in the final third of this film and its completely out of left field. You can literally see the audience click off the minute Leo goes into a hallucinatory state of jungle madness and imagines himself in his own video game. It seems like a parallel to the wacky Daffy’s madness, but even that is left to speculation whether he killed himself or one of the island people knifed him to protect their secret. One guy isn’t allowed to leave to have a toothache fixed and another with shark bites is banished because he’s bumming them out.All this exists in a film that is never boring and visually arresting, but never follows through on the ideas it sets up, loses its way completely in the final act, and leaves the audience falling short of paradise.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=3453&reviewer=198
originally posted: 02/15/00 08:05:53
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USA
11-Feb-2000 (R)
DVD: 22-Oct-2002
UK
N/A
Australia
09-Mar-2000 (MA)
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