While watching The Beach, you'll feel every wave of water, every breeze of air, every ray of sunshine. But not much else.
The Beach (2000)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:114
Fresh:22
Rotten:92
Average Rating:4.4/10
Consensus: Critics say The Beach is unfocused and muddled, a shallow adaptation of the novel it is based on. Points go to the gorgeous cinematography, though.
Runtime: 2 hrs
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Richard (DiCaprio) is a typical twenty-something American whose head is filled with an absurd amount of pop-culture and video game references. While travelling in Thailand in order to broaden his... Richard (DiCaprio) is a typical twenty-something American whose head is filled with an absurd amount of pop-culture and video game references. While travelling in Thailand in order to broaden his horizons and gain some real world experience, he meets Daffy (Carlyle), a crazy Englishman who gives Richard a mysterious map before committing suicide. Apparently the map leads to an idyllic island where the inhabitants live in a natural paradise. Intrigued, Richard convinces two French acquaintances, Francoise and Etienne (Ledoyen and Canet), to journey with him and see if Daffy was right. Upon reaching the island, Richard discovers that it does, in fact, appear to be the dream that Daffy had promised. They meet Sal (Swinton), a strong-willed woman and leader of the group. Sal has made a pact with the weapon-wielding drug dealers who control the island that her group can remain there provided no new bodies arrive. Richard has a brief tryst with Francoise, but she abandons him when she discovers that he has had another sexual encounter while gathering supplies from the mainland. And when two drugged-out Americans show up and crash the party, Richard's newfound Utopia is threatened once and for all. [More]
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet, Robert Carlyle, Paterson Joseph, Jerry Swindall, Peter Youngblood Hills, Lars Arentz Hansen, Staffan Kihlbom, Magnus Lindgren, Victoria Smurfit
Director: Danny Boyle
Director: Danny Boyle
Screenwriter: John Hodge
Producer: Andrew MacDonald
Composer: Angelo Badalamenti
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Reviews for The Beach
It has a mythical pull to which anyone who's ever felt trapped inside an office cubicle, yearning for escape, will relate. The surprise is that the movie makes that cubicle seem like a mighty nice place to be.
The Beach is the kind of literary rubbish that makes you trace the patterns in the carpet while you're supposed to be watching the screen.
The movie is an experience, of a sort they had a name for in the '60s: bummer.
An utterly common and uninvolving amalgam of paradise photography, detached pop psychology and watered-down danger.
A seriously confused film that makes three or four passes at being a better one and doesn't complete any of them.
Well paced, acted and filmed, always interesting, with only a few sticky moments and rough end.
An uneasy blend of tones and styles, a disappointing return to the spotlight by its star and another jumbled effort by its director.
All the beauty in the world can't camouflage the movie's gorgeous emptiness.
It's hard to believe a studio would green-light a film so emotionally lukewarm and even downright hokey as this if not for Leo's presence.
The appeal of the new Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle The Beach can be summed up in one word: scenery.
Its narrative waters become rather muddy in the late going, and its currents finally don't run very deep.
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