Directed by Blue Crush veteran John Stockwell, Into the Blue stars Walker and Alba as twentysomething treasure hunters Jared and Sam. The couple makes a modest living retrieving trinkets from the ocean floor in the Bahamas. Jared holds little more to his name than a rickety old boat he wouldn't dare take out to sea, while Sam can't afford enough clothing to cover herself properly. They don't have much, but they have each other. I suppose they also have their youth and beauty, which they're more than happy to flaunt in the rewardingly gratuitous underwater montage that immediately precedes their big discovery.

While horsing around with best friend Bryce (Scott Caan) and his latest floozy (Ashley Scott), Jared uncovers an ancient silver flask that most likely belonged to notorious pirate Tillman Thorpe, which means Thorpe's long-lost vessel, the Zephyr, can't be far. Then, as an added bonus, he finds a recently crashed plane just a few yards away. Turns out the plane belongs to a ruthless local drug dealer who desperately wants to retrieve his cargo of water-sealed cocaine.

Now, Jared can't report the drug-stocked plane because that would mean the police would swarm the site of the Zephyr before he has the chance to pillage it properly. But the longer he waits, the riskier his search becomes. The movie presents this as a moral dilemma of staggering magnitude, as if there's an important after-school lesson here that audiences might one day find themselves facing. On the right-thing-to-do side, Jared and Sam are willing to "give up the treasure for love," while on the bad-decisions-have-consequences side, Bryce and his skanky accomplice think it would be a good idea to sell some of the blow back to the drug dealers who lost it.

Can you guess what happens? Sure, the outcome is inevitable, but Stockwell comes through with the action, squeezing in as much skin and gore as he can into the movie's PG-13 rating (my favorite bit: when Jessica Alba finds herself handcuffed to a corpse, she has to hack the guy's arm off to get free). I'm not sure these four self-absorbed surfer types really deserve to inherit Thorpe's treasure, but Alba and Walker are generous enough with their booty that it's worth going along for the ride.

[as featured on Premiere.com]