From Deseret News archives:
Beach, The
Film review
After making fans wait so long for his follow-up to "Titanic," it probably wasn't the wisest choice for Leonardo DiCaprio to wash up on "The Beach."
Perhaps "wash up" is too strong a word, since it would take more than one bad movie to completely destroy the career of someone as popular as DiCaprio.
Or perhaps not, since this superficial, pretentious adaptation of Alex Garland's novel is pretty awful filmmaking. The obvious swipes of material from "Lord of the Flies," "Lost Horizon" and "The Blue Lagoon" are bad enough, but when the story takes a turn toward "Apocalypse Now" (you have to see it to believe it), things get downright laughable.
Of course, it's not as if DiCaprio is the only one sticking out his neck here. Director Danny Boyle has been looking for something anything to follow up his indie hit "Trainspotting." And while "The Beach" is not quite as bad as Boyle's previous film, "A Life Less Ordinary," it comes pretty close.
Still, the person with his name above the title is DiCaprio, who stars as Richard, a bored American twentysomething looking for a new thrill in Thailand. As it turns out, adventure comes looking for him in the person of Daffy (played by over-the-top Robert Carlyle), an apparently whacked-out Scotsman with a preposterous tale to tell about a nearby island paradise.
And after they make the perilous journey, they discover the real truth: that there really is such an island, and it has two thriving communities one comprised of fellow thrill seekers and the other made up of Thai drug traffickers.
The trio quickly falls in with the hedonists, who are led by the charismatic and enigmatic Sal (Tilda Swinton). And while they are happy for a time, the whole island's delicate balance is threatened by petty jealousies, encroachments from the "real" world and Richard's increasingly manic behavior.









