WATERWORLD REVIEW - January 1994
| Any film that kicks off with Kevin Costner pissing into a
jar and then drinking it is always, essentially, going to be all right by me. Sadly for
Waterworld, the plot is nowhere near as good at holding water as Kev's bladder. It
would be only too easy to spend the whole of this page listing just the most gaping of the
holes in the movie's basic premise - like, when the entire planet started to go
submarine, why didn't everyone simply get a map and immediately head for the highest
mountain they could find? And if they're so short of fresh water, how come boiling
it didn't occur to anyone? And centuries after the demise of civilisation, what does
Jeanne Tripplehorn use to shave her immaculately smooth armpits with? - but that would be
a bit unfair. After all, Star Wars has a pretty silly storyline, hasn't it?
Princesses, evil empires, space stations the size of a planet - how do you build
something the size of a planet? And what about Stargate? Or Batman, come to that. So let's forget the plot. The scriptwriters obviously did. The fact of the matter is that while Waterworld is one of the most inventively stupid ways of blowing 200 million quid anyone's so far thought of, it's also a pretty entertaining movie. Costner is a pleasingly grumpy male lead, Tripplehorn fulfils a rather thin role with commendable determination, Dennis Hopper is Dennis Hopper and Tina Majorino is the first child star in a decade you haven't wanted to punch. It zips along without ever giving you a chance to stop and point out the colossal inconsistencies, and if you don't fall off your sofa laughing at the climactic rescue scene, you have the heart of a fish. Of course it's stupid. So what? Just leave it alone, alright? B- |
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