Bombs Away!

Chasing Mavericks, this month’s 20th Century Fox surf drama based on the story of a sweet, doomed big-wave rider named Jay Moriarity, will enter theaters without a ripple of acclaim and kick out a few weeks later with minus-tide earnings. That’s one old surf-geezer’s prediction, anyway. Hollywood can’t do surfing. For 50-something years now, beginning with Gidget, Tinseltown has muffed it. Overcooked drama. Undercooked characters. Expensive action shots (which, yes, look great on a big screen) stapled to cut-rate scripts. Ride the Wild Surf, Big Wednesday, Blue Crush, Soul Surfer—each one is, at best, a damp approximation of a surfing life. The problem is, surfing has no hook. You do it—a lot, obsessively even—and in terms of story arc that’s pretty much it. The whole point is to continue. You rode a huge wave? You won the big contest? Grea...