Review of 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The crazed Captain Nemo (robustly played with plummy relish by Sean Lawlor) wants to wreak havoc upon the world by turning the waves upside down. It's up to a submarine rescue crew to stop him. Sound good and thrilling? Well, it just ain't. Gabriel Bologna's flat and pedestrian (non)direction crucially fails to inject any real tension, energy, or excitement into the plodding narrative; instead this flick gets severely bogged down in a numbing surplus of drippy dialogue thanks to Eric Forsberg's blah and long-winded script. The mostly crummy acting likewise fails to impress, with the top thespic dishonors copped by the ever-wooden Lorenzo Lamas' stiff portrayal of the stalwart Lieutenant Michael Arronax and Natalie Stone's supremely grating turn as Arronax's bitchy ex-wife Liuetenant Commander Lucille Conciel (Stone sports one of the worst and most unconvincing British accents to disgrace celluloid in the last five years). The bland cinematography, terrible CGI effects (the giant squids are especially hokey and laughable), infrequent and ineptly staged action scenes, and generic marital score all don't help matters any. Moreover, this picture is too dull and lifeless to even work on a so-bad-it's-good kitschy level. A real stinker.