Never Date a Drug Dealer

George Clooney is a really good actor. I say that not because I’ve watched some recent work of his that shows how well he’s grown and how he’s put a cap on his career. Quite the opposite. Recently I’ve seen more than one of his early works, films that no one really needs to bother with, that could simply have been forgotten and we, as a society, would all likely be better off. And yet, the one thing that stands clear to me is that Clooney, despite the shit going on around him, always shines. He’s a good actor that, for a time, starred in terrible stuff, and he always made his parts better for it.

We recently looked at Return to Horror High, which is a terrible comedic slasher improved, for a few short scenes, by Clooney. I would also point over to Return of the Killer Tomatoes, a fantastic comedic take on monster cinema (and a sequel to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes) where Clooney, in a supporting role, absolutely steals the show. And now we have Red Surf, one of Clooney’s earliest lead credits. The film is terrible, make no mistake, but it almost works because Clooney is in the lead. A bad movie is still a bad movie, but without Clooney here, the film would be nigh unwatchable.

Clooney stars as Remar, a former surfer turned drug runner who, with his friends Attila (Doug Savant) and True Blue (Philip McKeon), essentially has the lock on drugs coming into their small slice of Los Angeles. They have a deal worked out with the local drug lord, Calavera (Rick Najera), where they pick up the drugs off the coast and bring them in, the Calavera pays them and ships the drugs out across the city. It pays well, and long as nothing shakes the boat, Remar could continue running this deal all his life.

However, he wants more. Well, more specifically, his girlfriend, Rebecca (Dedee Pfeiffer) wants more. She’s pregnant and wants out of the life of drugs and violence. To make that happen Remar needs one last, big score. He and Attila work out a deal with Calavera to bring in a lot of drugs all at once for a big pay day. The only issue is that while this deal is worked out. True Blue gets popped by the cops and rats out one of Calavera’s drug houses, losing the drug lord a lot of money while also leading to Calavera’s own brother getting caught… and they know who did it, too. Now Remar has to decide if the deal is more important than one of his own men, and trying to have both could lead to everyone getting killed.

There really isn’t much story to Red Surf. It’s almost a slice of life study of Remar and his pals as they hang out, party, do a run for some drugs out in the ocean, and then go back to partying and having fun. The closest we get to a storyline is Remar and Rebecca trying to find a way to have a life together, only for Remar to, at every turn, screw it up somehow. It’s a cycle we play out, and as a character study it’s mildly interesting, if only because one of the main players is George Clooney and even in an awful, underwritten role, he still shines.

Remar is a nothing character. He’s an abusive asshole with no development, no character arc, and no real reason to care about him. When we meet him he’s already elbow deep in the drug scene, and the only explanation we get comes an hour into the film when we see him go surfing (so that means in a film called Red Surf it takes an hour to get to the titular activity) and there’s a photo of him winning an award at one point. He used to surf, but suffered some nondescript injury and had to give it up and, for some reason, drug running was his fallback. Why? Who knows. The film never says.

We need to care about Remar if we’re going to follow him as the protagonist, and while the film certainly has the following part down pat, it doesn’t build up his character in any meaningful way. A good place to start the film would have been with Remar at a surfing competition, suffering his injury. Then we’d spend a little time building him up as a character, seeing him struggle to surf and having to find some other way to make ends meet. A chance encounter could lead him to help some guys get some “stuff” from a dropoff location out at sea, and then that could lead to him becoming the lead on those runs (with a bit of a time jump to speed things up). Then we might actually realize how things worked and why, now, Remar is loath to give up the only connection he still has to the sea.

In comparison, Rebecca has a ton of character development here but she’s an empty and annoying character we don’t want to spend any time around. That’s because, sorry to say, Dedee Pfeiffer is just not a very good actress, at least not here. She spends the entire film moping and barely emoting, giving us nothing to work with. We agree that Remar is a dick and we want her to escape him (like she plans to do at one point, after learning she’s pregnant, by heading to Portland), but as a character we don’t like or understand her at all. She needs more charisma, more depth, the kinds of things that can only be provided by the actress playing her, and we just don’t get that here.

But then, just watching the film, all I could do was question why anything was going on. We don’t get Remar’s backstory for most of the film so we don’t understand why we should care about him. Because we don’t know who he used to so we have no context for why Rebecca likes him or why she’s still with him. And when it comes to Remar’s “job”, we really don’t even understand how any of it works. He and his buddies get on waterbikes and head out from the shore to a drop point at sea, grab a bag of drugs that was left there, and then drive it back. Why? How does that work?

Shouldn’t the drug lord, Calavera, be able to send his own men over to the drugs to get them? If you think, “well, maybe he doesn’t know where the drugs are,” later in the film he sends some of his men to jump Remar and his guys at the drop point, so they clearly know where it is. And who is dropping these drugs off? Some foreign seller? Is Remar just the middle man, and if so, why is he even involved in the chain? None of this is answered, or even questioned by the film, leaving us with nothing but an empty film without anything real going on inside it. It’s just a collection of scenes.

That bothers me, as do all the empty characters and their nothing lives we have to sit through for over an hour and a half. But what really bothers me is that we don’t get enough surfing, and none of it is red. The movie is called Red Surf and, call me pedantic, I’d like a little of that once. If this movie is going to suck as much as it does, at least give me some blood in the water while people surf around. This film is apparently too good for that, but it’s not at all good at being anything else. On all fronts, save one, this film really blows, and that one saving grace is Clooney. Without him in the lead role I would have shut this film off in the first ten minutes. Something tells me most people won’t even make it that far.