Surf’s Up attempts to extend the recent
public surge in affection for penguins, telling the buoyant, reciprocal story
of a mentor and pupil who ultimately each show one another sides of life they’ve
both been missing out on. Making substantial use of ascendant young star Shia
LaBeouf’s
personality, the likeable production puts a loose-limbed, mostly agreeable spin
on a story with a familiar for-love-of-the-sport moral.
character-focused documentary, the film chronicles headstrong teenage penguin
Cody Maverick (LaBeouf),
who leaves his Antarctic hometown of Shiverpool to follow his dream of becoming
a successful surfer. Befriended along the way by the distractible Chicken Joe (Jon
Heder), Cody arrives at Pen Gu Island just in advance of the Big Z Memorial
Surf Off, an annual competition named for Cody’s idol.
Cody immediately faces a setback in his efforts to dethrone the preening, jerky
reigning champion, Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader). Cast into exile for a few days,
Cody is taken under the wing of a laid-back, hermetic surfer (Jeff Bridges) who
becomes his mentor. With this help, Cody learns to balance his desire to win
with the pure pleasure of surfing, and the friendships and enjoyment that this
affords.
marks many kids’ flicks, Surf’s Up does make certain to include a number of
bodily function jokes. It also features a peppy modern soundtrack, driven by
toe-tapping alt-rock tunes from acts like Green Day, the Romantics, Incubus and
the New Radicals. Still, the movie’s mode
of expression — a lurking-narrator-style nipped from any number of popular
reality TV shows, peppered with canted angles, ironic framing and camera pans,
off-screen questions and the occasional broken-glass and wet lens effects — may
prove less easily graspable to the PG-rated picture’s chief demographic age
range.