Soul Surfer

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

I've always enjoyed AnnaSophia Robb's performances and here she pretty much holds this film together. Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt are fine as the parents but no one else really stands out, in truth they aren't given much to do.

A true story that follows the typical inspirational sports movie structure, I'll be honest I was in it for the shark attack. It's one shot, very quick, pretty tasteful (lolz). As for the rest of the film it's pretty uninspired direction, it does it's job. I'm hoping those other surfers were hired because they are surfers, because they sure ain't good actors.

The arm missing effects are pretty well done, some of the face replacements in the surfing shots give themselves away a bit though. But there are some great surfing shots, my favourite being a slow motion underwater angle of a crucial moment for the plot when she is duck diving under and can't hold the board down and gets pulled back by the wave and dumped. It's pretty brief but was awesome. There's a few other shot like that too.

The "Soul" in the title should have been a dead give away but I was unprepared for the whole religious crisis of faith half of the film. It's not really a crisis of faith, she never looses hope enough for that. The whole film is pretty upbeat. And they never get too schmaltzy thankfully.

In fact they rarely get too anything. It's a very bland paint by numbers script. It goes through the motions but rarely connects. When it does it's because of Robb's performance.

This is one of the rare cases where I'd recommend not staying for the credits to see the extra footage because it almost ruined the move for me. When you show the real life counterparts of the characters in the film at the end, as cool as it is to see the same events played back for real it cheapens everything that came before it. And to cap it off with the worst amateur iMovie style end titles didn't help at all either.

So forgetting that, you're left with a very bland but easily digestible true story inspirational movie. I can't help but think someone like Catherine Hardwicke would have done wonders with this story. It just needed a push, in ANY direction.