Subject: REVIEW: WATERWORLD

From: [email-masked] (Joan Ellis)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 22:45:29 GMT

WATERWORLD
                       A film review by Joan Ellis
                    Copyright 1995 Nebbadoon Syndicate

     WATERWORLD is definitely a bad hair movie.  Dennis Hopper has none,
Kevin Costner's is thinning, and Hopper's assistant thug looks as if
his has been growing for decades.  In the absence of humor, drama, or
character chemistry, you notice things like that.

     This movie just can't make up its mind.  Should it be a spiritual
sea epic, or should it be this year's violent action movie?  The primal
man/woman/child unit is pitted against the sea in search of any spot of
dry land than might have survived the melting of the polar icecaps.  The
Mariner (Costner), Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and Enola (Tina
Majorino), a little girl with a cryptic map to dry land tattooed on her
back, glisten with sweat and grow progressively weaker from sun and
salt in pale imitation of all lifeboat movies.

     Just as we are pondering the seriousness of the problem, a band of
the silliest villains you ever saw streaks over the horizon on Jet
Skis.  Armed with grisly weapons fashioned from the leftovers of
civilization, the Smokers are chasing the mariner, "the gentleman
guppy," whose gills are hidden mercifully behind his ears.

     Dennis Hopper is here to reprise his bad guy personality as the
Deacon, the Mariner's villainous rival.  If there is water, water
everywhere and not a drop to drink (converted urine serves), it doesn't
bother the Deacon, who has an endless supply of scotch, which he swills
while haranguing the world's survivors who are clustered on the rusting
hull of the infamous Exxon Valdez, which serves as their floating
home.

     The Smokers and the survivors, in spite of living in an ocean that
could clean them, are comically and inexplicably filthy.  Clad in
clothes and accents that range from imagined Renaissance to Grunge,
they seem to have passed through Krook's rag-and-bone shop on their way
to a company outing by the ocean.  It's a hodgepodge so ridiculous that
even a good performance by the little girl and some spiffy photography
of fireballs can't lift the leaden mass.

     Standing topside in a three-cornered hat to address the cheering
faithful.  The Deacon, in a charitable interpretation, is a sly
metaphor for the fundamentalist preachers who sermonize about family
values while they drink, womanize, and indulge themselves in luxury
bought with the contributions of their parishioners.  In the
uncharitable view, he's just a jerk.

     Covering his gouged eye socket with a patch and sporting a cleaver
as an artificial hand, Hopper tries mightily to invest his character
with a wink from his remaining eye to tell us this movie is fun.  But
even he can't surmount the deadly dullness of Kevin Costner's vision.

     If this is Costner's warning that we are ruining the planet, he
delivers it with a mailed fist.  This very earnest man has made a movie
without the redeeming qualities of romance, drama, or humor.  Is it
possible that he mistakes seriousness for dignity?  This is a lifeless
movie.  And don't even ask where the money went.

Film Critic :  JOAN ELLIS
Word Count  :  495
Studio      :  Universal      
Rating      :  PG-13
Running Time:  2h15m

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