Dead Calm is one of those movies that many have told me they liked, yet I have never really gotten into it. Maybe under one circumstance or another I've started watching it, or had an opportunity (maybe its coming on HBO in 20 minutes?) But just never got far past the opening.
So I finally sit down in front of it for 96 mins. I guess it tries hard to be a serious thriller, yet I can't take anything very seriously on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere. Phillip Noyce directed it, and, besides the two Jack Ryan movies he directed, he's made a couple of seriously flawed films (The Saint, Sliver). Maybe this movie takes itself a little too seriously.
I far prefer a campier version, like Kill Cruise (with Jurgen Prochnow, Jennifer Rubin, and Patsy Kensit) There the captain is a drunk, and his two passengers are the lowest form of party girls. When the crap starts to hit the fan there, you expect it. You've waited for it. You want it. You love it.
Here it's hard to imagine why Nicole Kidman didn't just kill Billy Zane any of the 1st 50 or so opportunities she had. The sort of needless and forced tension her hesitancy produces tends to lose my interest quickly. In the film's so called climax, she performs the Herculean task of driving the boat, and shining the light, and pulling her husband-200lbs of wet, exhausted man-to safety from a fast-moving boat. Yet in the film's opening she can't drive and talk at the same time without causing a fatal accident.
One man's irony is another's idiocy.
So I finally sit down in front of it for 96 mins. I guess it tries hard to be a serious thriller, yet I can't take anything very seriously on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere. Phillip Noyce directed it, and, besides the two Jack Ryan movies he directed, he's made a couple of seriously flawed films (The Saint, Sliver). Maybe this movie takes itself a little too seriously.
I far prefer a campier version, like Kill Cruise (with Jurgen Prochnow, Jennifer Rubin, and Patsy Kensit) There the captain is a drunk, and his two passengers are the lowest form of party girls. When the crap starts to hit the fan there, you expect it. You've waited for it. You want it. You love it.
Here it's hard to imagine why Nicole Kidman didn't just kill Billy Zane any of the 1st 50 or so opportunities she had. The sort of needless and forced tension her hesitancy produces tends to lose my interest quickly. In the film's so called climax, she performs the Herculean task of driving the boat, and shining the light, and pulling her husband-200lbs of wet, exhausted man-to safety from a fast-moving boat. Yet in the film's opening she can't drive and talk at the same time without causing a fatal accident.
One man's irony is another's idiocy.