The Surfer is a movie in two parts, both annoying in their own ways. It stars Nicholas Cage as a dad trying to rebuy his childhood home on the coast of Australia. He wants to take his kid surfing but the locals are like, “yeah, nah mate”. So he hangs around the parking lot for a long, long time.

The half of the movie that’s about a straight-laced businessman frustrated by the young tuff surf goons is annoying because it feels forced and scripted. There’s no logical reason for Cage to hang around and the longer the film goes on, the more arbitrary the things he does to make the situation more miserable feel. It’s dumb on both a character and script level and it annoyed me. It didn’t bore me, but it made me roll my eyes constantly.

It also made me wonder what is this movie even about… constantly! It’s not fun when you can’t figure out WHY things are happening and what’s the point of it all. Just go home!

But eventually it starts to become clear (“clear” being a subjective word here) that there’s something more internal going on. That there’s a metaphorical scenario that we’re being asked to interpret. Only… I’d checked out by then. Whatever they were going for in Cage’s sun-addled brain was irrelevant to me. I didn’t want to play their reindeer games, constantly trying to put two and two together to understand what’s really going on.

On the plus side, the film has a definite, deliberate, and unique visual language. It goes for a aggressively sunny, bleary-eyed interpretive look, a surrealism that I could appreciate on a craft level.

But that’s not enough. I hated the experience of watching this movie. Maybe at a much shorter length that didn’t feel like it was constantly spinning its wheels while waving a magic wand, asking me to dig it, maybe then I’d have tolerated the tedium.

Score: 61