Friday, November 14, 2014

After the Storm (2001)



Who's In It: Benjamin Bratt (Demolition Man, Miss Congeniality), Mili Avital (Stargate, Dead Man), Armand Assante (Judge Dredd, The Odyssey), Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, The Bride), and Stephen Lang (Avatar, Terra Nova).

What It's About: A scavenger (Bratt) and his girlfriend (Avital) form an uneasy alliance with a boat captain (Assante) and his wife (Simone-Élise Girard) to salvage treasure from a sunken yacht. Beals has a small role as a passenger on the doomed yacht and Lang plays the British sergeant major who leads the local law enforcement.

How It Is: Based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway, After the Storm is really good, old-fashioned noir set in the Bahamas. It's easy to imagine the same story being shot in the '40s with Humphrey Bogart in the lead role. All of the characters are complex and none of them are completely trustworthy, so it's a lot of fun seeing the events that force them together and then trying to predict who's going to double-cross whom.

The only drawback is a CGI shark that protects the sunken yacht. I wish director Guy Ferland (Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights) would've filmed a real shark instead, but other than that the movie looks great and makes excellent use of its scenery in Belize.

I really don't want to say more than that, but fans of classic noir should check it out.

Rating: Four out of five treacherous treasure-hunters.



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