Waterworld (1995)

Waterworld

1995

Starring: Kevin Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Dennis Hopper, Jack Black, Michael Jeter, Tina Majorino

Directed By: Kevin Reynolds

Well, it's been a while since my last review and I decided to catch back up with the Readers Choice Review that my loyal readers voted upon. You guys spoke and Waterworld was the winner, or loser in this case. Without further ado, on to the review....

This movie opens up with The Mariner (Kevin Costner) floating his little boat around and drinking his own urine. Why would he do such a thing? Because the polar ice caps have melted and flooded the earth and he can't exactly drink salt water. However, urine contains salt, so the filmmakers decided to have some sort of filtration system rigged up to his boat. Yeah, like Costner's really that smart. It only gets worse from here and this is how the movie opens.

With the world covered in water, everyone in this film has hopes of one day finding dry land. The only problem is that this film takes place in the future and basically all technology has been wiped out, so any chance of using technology is null and void. However, once The Mariner comes across a woman and small girl, he finds a map tatooed on the back of the small girl which could lead to dry land.

Kevin Costner's acting in this film is kind of mysterious. At one moment you think he just might be some heroic figure of importance, but then through a series of events it turns out he's just some fucked up mutant with gills and no real importance at all. It's kind of like buying a new car and finding a secret compartment only to open it and realize that the compartment is a fuse box. Not that a fuse box is bad, because it's vital to running a car, but here the fuse box (Kevin Costner) has a short circuit and the film seems to fall upon his weakened shoulders.

One of the more redeeming qualities Waterworld has is Dennis Hopper. Ok, you can put Dennis Hopper in a freaking ballerina outfit and have him take a dump for an hour and a half and it would be entertaining. So, for the sake of Dennis Hopper, this film is worth watching ONCE just for him. He plays the villainous Deacon, and to be honest, I was rooting for him to kill Costner the whole damn movie. Another redeeming quality of Waterworld would be the small (and I mean small) role of Jack Black, who plays a pilot. It's such a small role that if you blink you'll miss him, but since Jack Black is in it with Dennis Hopper, that's really all I can say that's good about Waterworld. Oh yeah, did I mention Hopper wears an eyepatch?

With that said, Waterworld is an absolute mess of a movie. With one of the most expensive budgets ever (and it didn't even make all the money back), you would think that they would have hired someone to polish the bad script and get someone better than Costner to star. This movie tries to be Mad Max at times and at other times it tries to get the audience to take it serious. We can't because Costner sucks in anything he does and the script is horrible. There isn't one memorable line of dialogue in the whole movie and if there was anything worth quoting, my guess is that it came from Dennis Hopper.

The special fx (for their time) are decent at best, but are cheap compared to today's standards. That's sad considering how much money they spent on them. My guess is that someone who was in charge of special fx was a HUGE coke addict and 70 percent of the budget went up their nose. 20 percent went to Kevin Costner and the final 10 percent went for the actual movie. While blowing (no pun intended) the budget through the roof, Waterworld was the center of critic's angst as it failed to produce a movie that was of the quality that the filmmakers promised. In fact, other than Jack Black and Dennis Hopper, it was a bad movie. It was so bad that Costner didn't work again for a year. Considering that at that time he was doing two to four movies a year, Waterworld cut him down for a bit.

The directing in the movie is horrible and all the actors seem to be held at knife-point to deliver bad dialogue. The editing is all over the place and the film is actually about 30 minutes too long. This is sad because the actual premise of Waterworld isn't a bad one, in fact it's actually kind of original, but it falls flat the moment we see Costner drink his own piss. Unfortunately that's about three minutes into the movie. Any movie that starts out with a man drinking his own piss cannot get any better. In fact, drinking my own piss might have been more enjoyable than sitting through Waterworld.

Full of bad dialogue, bad editing and direction, mediocre special fx, and Kevin Costner, steer clear of Waterworld like you would the Bermuda Triangle. This is a bad movie and though it's like a car wreck in that you can't turn away, it's better not to have looked at it in the first place. Had Kevin Costner been replaced by someone who could act, the script been polished by someone who could write in something besides crayon, and the editor cut about 30 minutes out of it, Waterworld might actually be worth watching. Since none of that happened, we get a movie about a mutant Costner looking for land in a world of piss drinking waterdogs.

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