Movie review: Into the Blue ***

Recently it occurred to me I have no problems admitting to guilty pleasures.

Once, when I was younger, I postured. Now there's not a drip of self-consciousness. I bore coworkers with the details of how I watched Eurotrip again (and loved it, again). With no reservations whatsoever I recommend The Day After Tomorrow to strangers and barely stop gushing over Dude, Where's My Car? before I'm saying The Girl Next Door was "underrated for a teen sex flick."

To that list I add Into the Blue, the deep-sea diving adventure thing that opens today and stars Paul Walker and Jessica Alba the way programs on the Food Network star forks and spoons.

They play a morally conflicted cute couple in the Bahamas who pine for buried treasure and stumble on a shipwreck and a downed plane full of smuggled cocaine, all in the same dive. "I believe in you more than the prospect of any treasure," Alba says to stoic Walker.

Their friends are Scott Caan, who has the jumpiness of a short guy, and Ashley Scott, as a floozy you know is bad news because her eyebrows go up and she's not as corn-fed as Alba or Walker - who should be cast immediately as Aquaman, the most boring of all superheroes.

Dry, Walker is bland.

Wet, he's slightly less bland.

The real stars of Into the Blue are the following, in no orderof billing: Alba's bikini, which constantly gives her a premium wedgie that cinematographer Peter Zuccarini homes in on as if it were Brando in Streetcar; Josh Brolin, quite convincing as an oily treasure hunter; the Bahamas, photographed so strikingly the movie will satisfy if you don't have the budget for an actual vacation; the schools of sharks, not digital but real, lethal, and forever circling - they seem to genuinely unsettle the actors.

This is a picture composed of pretty distractions, which is plenty sometimes. Notice how preposterous the plot is? (Hey, look, sunbathing!) Notice how underwater action, since Diamonds are Forever, has not gotten any more thrilling? (Wow, I mean, how do these people tan so evenly?)

On the way out of the screening the woman in the car in front of me had a bumper sticker: "I like skinny pale guys."

Clearly, a woman in denial.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com

or 419-724-6117.