I watched this film at 12:00am last night (tuesday 15th Nov) as it was the best of a bad lot. With nothing else on the box I thought I'd give it a go. And how glad am I that I did? Slightly glad. But not desperately.
To be honest I thought that it was a reasonable film; adventures on the high seas have to do something to become different from the rest. The use of a freak weather event may seem like an oceanic take on day after tomorrow, as I thought it would be reading a summary ahead of watching, but actually the weather took up a very short amount of time. A lot of this film was devoted to the rite of passage that the boys/ young men go through before they reach the "white squall" itself, and this allows for the typical moving goodbyes to trapped loved one as the ship sinks.
This is just one of the reasons that I didn't give this a higher rating. The corny moments did make me squirm, and the moment when Frank (one of the young men) rings the ships bell in court sent the "corn-o-meter" off the chart and caused, to be honest, a feeling of an anticlimax. There was of course the sterling speech from our hero narrator, which we come to expect when a friend/mentor/good guy is up against a court, but the inclusion of the bell ringing did perhaps sway me towards an even lower rating before I reminded myself of the good moments of the film.
There are some very believable performances all round, and I did especially like the old grizzly English teacher, with his insatiable love for his subject. Jeff Bridges does give a good performance and the young narrator, Scott Wolf (did anyone else think he looked a little bit like a very young Tom Cruise) did a good job as well.
All in all, it's a good film to be watching at 12 o'clock at night, but it does sink into mediocrity as soon as dawn breaks and you can find something worth watching. Not a must see, but not awful by any accounts.
To be honest I thought that it was a reasonable film; adventures on the high seas have to do something to become different from the rest. The use of a freak weather event may seem like an oceanic take on day after tomorrow, as I thought it would be reading a summary ahead of watching, but actually the weather took up a very short amount of time. A lot of this film was devoted to the rite of passage that the boys/ young men go through before they reach the "white squall" itself, and this allows for the typical moving goodbyes to trapped loved one as the ship sinks.
This is just one of the reasons that I didn't give this a higher rating. The corny moments did make me squirm, and the moment when Frank (one of the young men) rings the ships bell in court sent the "corn-o-meter" off the chart and caused, to be honest, a feeling of an anticlimax. There was of course the sterling speech from our hero narrator, which we come to expect when a friend/mentor/good guy is up against a court, but the inclusion of the bell ringing did perhaps sway me towards an even lower rating before I reminded myself of the good moments of the film.
There are some very believable performances all round, and I did especially like the old grizzly English teacher, with his insatiable love for his subject. Jeff Bridges does give a good performance and the young narrator, Scott Wolf (did anyone else think he looked a little bit like a very young Tom Cruise) did a good job as well.
All in all, it's a good film to be watching at 12 o'clock at night, but it does sink into mediocrity as soon as dawn breaks and you can find something worth watching. Not a must see, but not awful by any accounts.