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Good-looking, but basically shallow teen pic – still, it’s well-acted and has impressive surfing scenes to boot.

If you’ve seen Adaptation (and you should), you may be surprised to note Susan Orlean’s name on the opening credits of Blue Crush. This is because the movie is loosely based on another one of her magazine articles, entitled “The Surf Girls of Maui”. It’s also competently directed by John Stockwell, who proved his teen movie credentials with last year’s Crazy/Beautiful.

Hawaiian Hi-Jinks

Set and filmed on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, the film features rising star Kate Bosworth (who also has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part in The Rules of Attraction) as Anne Marie, a dedicated Surfer Chick who lives in a beach shack with her best friends Eden and Lena (Michelle Rodriguez, Sanoe Lake) and precocious little sister Penny (talented child actress Mika Boorem, from Riding In Cars With Boys and Hearts in Atlantis).

The girls work as chambermaids in a luxury hotel to stay afloat financially, but they’re much more interested in catching waves, punching tubes, riding pipes and a whole bunch of other (probably more accurate) surfing terms.

In terms of plot, Anne Marie has to a) look after her increasingly wayward younger sister after their mother abandoned them, b) decide how serious she is about her new quarterback boyfriend (Matthew Davis) and c) overcome her Personal Demons (i.e. a near-fatal wipe-out) before entering the Pipe Masters Surf Competition…

Pretty Standard But Good Fun All The Same

Pretty standard stuff then, plot-wise and there are no prizes for guessing how it all ends up. However, the cast of – relative - unknowns are all likeable and there’s some amusing comic relief from the other members of the football team, particularly in the scene where the girls teach them to surf.

The effects are mostly good too, with the camera often taking you right inside the waves for a board’s-eye view. However, though the girls did most of their own surfing, there are a couple of laughably dodgy CGI moments in which Anne Marie’s face is digitally super-imposed onto a professional surfer’s body. (It doesn’t help that the body in question looks male).

The sound effects, however, are excellent, particularly during the wipe-outs and the flashback scenes to Anne Marie’s accident will definitely have you wincing.

For teenagers, then, this has something for everyone – exciting surf scenes, your basic Girl Power message for the girls and, well, an hour and forty-five minutes of bikini-clad surfer chicks for the boys. In short, this is one to be filed under ‘Cheesy But Fun’. Worth watching.