Open Water 2: Adrift: Rating: 1 stars

Six friends + one yacht × (x) stupid mistakes = FAIL.

Open Water 2: Adrift (2006)
2006 · R · Thriller
Reviewed March 16, 2009
Move your cursor over the grayed-out text to reveal spoilers.

Open Water was about mildly unlikeable people getting caught in a net of diving mistakes — including their own — that left them stranded in the middle of the ocean, face-to-face with a grisly, sharky fate. Open Water 2: Adrift is about highly unlikeable (but smokin’ hot) people doing things so stupid that it is amazing they survived to adulthood on land. Once they’re in the water, they’ve got no friggin’ chance.

The first movie worked because it kept things simple: two people, a failure to communicate, and a bunch of sharks. Even though that’s the formula that made it a sleeper success, the Powers That Be must have balked at taking the unconventional route twice in a row, because this flick takes the franchise straight back to the tried-and-true teen-horror formula: blaring music, hot bods, lots of shrieking, and a grisly one-by-one countdown to the last person left alive. The idea of six people being dumb enough to jump off a yacht without remembering to put a ladder down isn’t exactly far-fetched — it’s a depressingly, fatally common occurrence — but the filmmakers, apparently worried that we wouldn’t take the situation seriously enough, threw in a slew of other problems to add even more spice: aquaphobia, baby left on board, diving knives, hysterical bimbo, etc. ad nauseam.

And yet there are no sharks. Go figure.

Once they’re all in the water, the group proceeds to put their friendships to the test by shrieking accusations at each other and sulking. They also proceed to do every stupid thing they can think of, which of course results in even more drama and injury. It’s not really a spoiler to say they all start dying — of course people die in a movie like this; why else would you want to see it? — but there is nothing new or interesting about the methods or the order in which they kick the bucket. Meanwhile, you can entertain yourself amid the hysteria by pointing out the various methods of getting back on board that the shrieking swimmers don’t seem to see. (I counted at least three.) As far as I could tell, the entire group is in the water for less than a day — I’m gonna be generous and say twelve hours — and yet they all manage to die, without the help of predatory marine life. Seriously, the stupidity of these people makes their fate less a tragedy than a Darwin Award.

An hour and a half of your life drifts by, and the movie drifts slowly to its ambiguous ending. Why they went with such a pretentious final shot, I have no clue; it’s like the filmmakers belatedly tried to switch genres, without a lick of success. Save yourself the shrieking and give this a miss. You’re better off renting the first movie instead.