I thought the "meat" of this movie was fair, it was the parts leading up to it and the ending that were awful. This might have done a lot better as a much shorter film. Even at only an hour and 20 minutes, it was about 30 minutes to long.
The character development is *weak*. If you're not going to bother doing some real character development, don't do it at all. For the first 25 minutes, I could have been watching my girlfriend and I go through our daily ups and downs. If I wanted to watch that, I'd just video tape any random couple for a day and have all the footage I needed. The acting was fair at best. The chemistry between these two never worked for me. The bedroom scene was really a mystery to me. Here's our lovely female lead, * in bed. Boyfriend jumps in, they kiss, she wonders aloud if she's in the mood, they kiss, she decides she's not in the mood but wants to talk. He rolls over and they go to bed. I very much felt the only reason scenes like this were in the movie was to make it long enough to turn into a "feature" picture and put in theaters. Some of the deleted scenes reinforce this point as we're subjected to a scene that shows the alarm going off, the characters laying in bed, struggling to wake up, and then a 30 second shot slowly closing in on the ceiling fan. That's right, 30 seconds of ceiling fan action. Dramatic! I thought the ending was hacky as well, as if the writer had no idea how to end this movie. Techncailly, they didn't, as it was based on a true story and the true persons who experienced this are, of course, dead. Boyfriend has bled out from a shark bite inflicted late the previous day. Girlfriend pushes him away and he is quickly devoured by sharks. The last scene shows girlfriend commit suicide by drowning herself. First off...it's hard to drown yourself without weights. The body is naturally buoyant and it would take a heck of a lot willpower to keep from jerking your head above the water. Drowning hurts. A lot. The vast majority of the population would surface to stop the pain.
Secondly, how do we know this person committed suicide? Why not show the final image of the girlfriend adrift by herself? For me, that would have been a lot more dramatic than seeing her commit suicide in suspect fashion.
Had this movie started as the couple boarded the boat and ended with the camera slowly pulling back from girlfriend, alone in the water, I would have given it 6 stars. Combined with the hackey front "half" of the movie and the cop-out of an ending, I was pretty unsatisfied.
