What did you think of "The Beach"?   Good 36% 222   Bad 35% 212   Somewhere in between 8% 51   Haven't seen it 21% 126 Total Votes   611

Verdict: Sand, surf and a secondhand plot.

Details: Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Virginie Ledoyen and Tilda Swinton. Rated R for violence, some strong sexuality, profanity and drug content. 1 hour, 59 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: The sun-loving dudes of "The Beach" think that life should be just that: a day on the beach. Even better, days and days on the beach, with nothing to do but spear fish for dinner, work that tan and smoke lots of weed. Unfortunately, Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie, the first he's made since cavorting aboard the moviegoer-loving "Titanic," is as empty-headed as its main characters.

DiCaprio, who has a film opening on the same weekend as his former shipmate Kate Winslet (see "Holy Smoke"), plays a restless young man named Richard. His character is so vaguely defined that it's surprising he even has a name instead of a label: Icon of Gen-X Ennui. Richard likes to travel; that's all we know about him. Oh, and he's feeling disenfranchised, detached, unconnected to the world. Even when he stumbles onto the bloody corpse of an acquaintance, he can't feel anything. "I was waiting for it to hit me, but it just didn't happen," he says in voice-over.

On the lookout for the next wild adventure, Richard lucks out in Bangkok, Thailand. A wreck of a guy, aptly named Daffy (manic Robert Carlyle), tells him about a hidden, forbidden island, a perfect beach, a true paradise. Better yet, he gives him a map.

Richard shares the secret with a couple of other attractive, aimless people like himself, French couple Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet). Like him, they apparently have no ties to a job, family or any kind of annoying responsibility. So they say, Bien sur, let's go.

Getting to the beach is the best part of the story. Once there, the movie turns into a tepid mixture of "Lost Horizon," "Lord of the Flies" and even "Peter Pan." That's because the island harbors a secret commune of lost boys and girls, rat-race dropouts like Richard and his pals. They're led by the steely founder, Sal (Tilda Swinton, bringing an elegant hint of danger to the movie). The rest of these characters are pretty interchangeable. The trailers for the flick don't show any of them, probably because the filmmakers don't want to bore you prematurely with their blond, blank company.

In short, things are great on the island, then they go bad. Mainly it's Richard's fault. Over and over, he does the wrong thing. We're supposed to empathize. Sent into the woods on a lookout mission, he has a mental meltdown and briefly becomes a tropical Travis Bickle. The character's imagination is so undernourished that, at the worst of his wacko phase, he imagines himself as the action hero of a video game.

In "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting," director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and screenwriter John Hodge explored the cynical self-absorption of characters in their early 20s. They need a new subject. Boyle directs with his usual flair, but the story fails him. The movie relies so much on DiCaprio's voice-overs that it starts to suffer from the same detachment plaguing its central character: It gets told to us, instead of letting us discover it as we go.

Maybe it's meant to be a satire, this tale of privileged young people who find paradise, then screw it up. But it's hard to get attached to characters who care about only one thing: their next moment of pleasure. It's like being asked to root for the two-dimensional figures in a mural. Cinematographer Darius Khondji ("Stealing Beauty," "Seven") makes the most of the exotic locations. But all the beauty in the world can't camouflage the movie's gorgeous emptiness.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

[an error occurred while processing this directive]