Ten years from now, a virus has wiped out a considerable portion of the Earth’s population — not just humans but all beings that sustain life. After this colossal devastation, a scientist developed a vaccine that stamped out the virus and successfully eradicated the disease. Before we get to the last bit, yes, this is part of the set-up to The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, which brings together at least half a dozen of professional sports stars for an extravagantly vulgar, unthinkably potty-mouthed, crudely animated fantasy comedy about attempting to make — well, you get the idea. On second thought, maybe you don’t get the idea, because there isn’t a single thing about this movie to which one can attribute even the kernel of a completed thought.
Its running time of 82 minutes might seem short on paper, but in reality, the film has been stretched so far beyond the breaking point that, at a certain point, screenwriter/co-director Nick Pollet just begins to repeat himself by having the characters do the same thing over and over again. That thing is to tell other characters about the population-ending virus and the world-saving vaccine — oh, and that the unfortunate side effect of the shot was that all people on the planet forgot what surfing was. Yes, this strange trade-off, which is treated with as much reverence as the hypothetical trauma that resulted from a global catastrophe, is the conceptual gimmick at the center of this story. The other gimmick is that it’s shown to us via stop-motion animation.
Make no mistake, by the way: the animation is nothing more than a gimmick. There is no artfulness to the implementation of it by Pollet and co-director Vaughan Blakey, who simply take a bunch of plastic dolls, slap wigs on their heads, gift them an otherwise fully functional anatomy (if you get the drift), and plop them into an endless and irritating loop for an hour or so. The “plot” has Hughie the surf god (voice of Ronnie Blakely) enlisting his sidekick Joey (voice of Joe Turpel) and former professional surfer Mick Fanning (the first to play a version of himself, sort of) to remind Mick’s fellow former colleagues of their sport’s existence. The idea is to make — well, you know.
None of this is funny or clever or, really, anything else. Indeed, were it not for a climax that pits the vaccine-creating scientist (voice of Blakey) against the ragtag team of newly-reminded surfers for reasons that are entirely inconsequential and through methods that are too scatological to mention here, the movie would not really have a plot. Instead, the movie just has one surfer going to the next one, recounting the last year of devastating events to them, and recruiting them for the moviemaking mission. The only exception is when one of them reveals himself to be “not about all that vaccine stuff,” which one supposes is meant to be a joke.
The other formula that develops is, when one of the surfers finally remembers what sport they played, we get extended flashbacks of the real men doing what they love. If that qualifies as a “positive” thing that separates the movie ever so slightly from receiving the lowest possible marks, well, there we are. Not even the useless framing device, which stars Luke Hemsworth as the narrator (probably because he’s recognizable enough to get the funding for this project), adds anything funny or clever or insightful. It’s flagrant vanity that led to the existence of The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, and it shows for every interminable second.
Photo courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment
The post The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe appeared first on Spectrum Culture.