Alas. Even those who adore Bill Murray and love every frame Wes Anderson ever shot will find themselves giving up halfway into The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
Initially, it's wonderful to look at Billy Murray as Steve Zissou, a sort of Jacques Cousteau celeb whose best days are behind him.
It's delightful to see Anjelica Huston as his brainy wife, a treat to watch Cate Blanchett as the bizarre groupie reporter, fun to look at Willem Dafoe as a loyal, emotional German engineer on Zissou's boat, entertaining to see Owen Wilson as a pilot who might be Zissou's illegitimate son and lovely as always to see the work of Jeff Goldblum as Zissou's rival in work and love, Michael Gambon as Zissou's film producer and Noah Taylor and Bud Cort doing almost anything they want.
But that doesn't last. Very soon -- despite all sorts of activity with man-eating sharks, boat tours, explanations of budget and filmmaking, electric jellyfish spotting, plane flying, hijackings, pirates, and whatnot -- the movie is becalmed. There's nothing going on. Script-wise, there's a lot of meandering.
The humour and the action are so 'inside' that most viewers are out of the movie at all times. You could regard The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou as just the sort of amateurish film the fictitious sea explorer Steve Zissou himself might make, but even so, the joke is quickly stale.
Some of the material is so sophomoric (the boat sails into a place called "Port Au Patois" -- for example) that it's hard to understand what Anderson was after here. What sort of mid-life crisis is under the microscope? And why should we care?
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is fairly dull and eventually annoying. It's one huge disappointment.
(This film is rated 14-A.)
NOTE: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou opens Dec. 25 in theatres.
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