Producers: Tyler Atkins, Jamie Arscott, Cathy Flannery, Jake Schwarz and Andrew Mann   Director: Tyler Atkins   Screenplay: Tyler Atkins and Drue Metz   Cast: Luke Hemsworth, Rasmus King, Isabel Lucas, Martin Sachs, Leeanna Walsman, Michael Sheasky and Savannah La Rain   Distributor: Gravitas Ventures

Grade: C

Some agreeable actors, lovely locales and nifty surfing footage aren’t enough to save this meandering Australian coming-of-age tale.  Perhaps the fact that “Ocean Boy” (the title changed from “Bosch & Rockit” for its American release) is not only semi-autobiographical but a first feature by Atkins, a model and Australian reality-show TV personality, helps to explain why it’s generally nice but something of a mess, with lots of corny dialogue.

Luke Hemsworth gives a gruffly winning performance as Bosch, a rough-and-ready Aussie who’s turned his forested land into a pot-growing-and-distribution operation that he runs in partnership with callow cop buddy Keith (Michael Sheasky).  Unfortunately Keith sees fit to bring an older colleague, Derek (Martin Sachs), into the mix; Sachs insists that Bosch expand the business by adding cocaine distribution to his services.  Bosch protests but Derek gives him no choice.  Unfortunately, the farm is soon swallowed up in a raging bushfire, and though he tries desperately to save them, Bosch watches Derek’s cash and drug stash go up in flames. 

He has no choice but to run, but he’ll have company—his thirteen-year old son Rockit (cherubic newcomer Rasmus King), whom he’s been taking care of, to use the phrase loosely, since his alcoholic wife Elizabeth (Leeanna Walsman) walked out on them. He’s taught the boy to surf, but that’s about it: Rockit skips school to ride the waves, and the result is that he can’t even read.  He gets into fights with classmates who have nicknamed him Dum-Dum. 

Bosch explains the hasty departure to the naïve kid by telling him they’re off on a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Byron Bay, where they’ll hit the beach for months.  Once there Bosch meets Debbie (Isabel Lucas), on whom he lavishes his considerable roguish charm, while Rockit falls in with Ashley (Savannah La Rain), whom he calls Ash-Ash for a cutesy reason with a serious backstory.  The result is a real case of puppy love.

Of course things can’t go swimmingly for long.  Keith and Derek find Bosch, and the threats are on.  Rockit is caught up in the danger, and after telling him a tall tale about being a spy (which the boy actually believes), Bosch takes his son to stay with his mother, who turns out to be no better a parent.  Eventually Rockit finds his way back to Byron Bay and Ash-Ash, and secures a job on a fishing boat, proving a natural in the prawn trade.  He might have to raise himself, but his future is fairly bright, even with his parents out of the picture—at least for now.

This is not simply a sweet story, but it is told, for the most part, in a very sweet, indeed overly sweet, fashion.  The most abrasive part comes, surprisingly enough, in the portrayal of Elizabeth, a self-obsessed woman whose callousness toward not only Bosch but Rockit is pretty awful.  But even the crime aspect of the tale is treated without any real sense of menace, even though Keith points a gun at Bosch at one point; by contrast Sachs plays Derek in such an overblown fashion that the character becomes almost comic.  The tension the subplot is apparently intended to generate never materializes, and the entire thread ends not with a bang but a whimper.  Given that, it’s curious that Atkins chooses to toss in a couple of F-bombs; though they’re used in jocular fashion, they tarnish the movie’s credentials as clean-cut family entertainment.

Where the film scores best is in its surfing footage, nicely shot by cinematographer Ben Nott (with an assist in the underwater sequences from Shane Fletcher), and the rapport between Hemsworth and King on the one hand and King and La Rain on the other.  King is obviously still unformed as an actor, but his naturalness pays dividends, making the boy seem authentically someone trying to feel his way toward maturity.  Scott Gray’s editing has problems—the picture lurches from scene to scene without much rhythm or style—but David McKay’s production design captures both the grubbiness of most of the interiors and the breathtaking quality of the seaside exteriors.  Brian Cachia’s score is unremarkable.

“Ocean Boy” is heartfelt and earnest, but despite the affecting father-son relationship at its center and some nice performances, it doesn’t leave a very vivid impression.

Producers: Roger Goff and Mark B. David   Director: Nicolas Harvard   Screenplay: John Glosser, Joseph Russo, Chris LaMont and Ben Kabialis   Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Kate Bosworth, Jeffrey Nordling, Gabriela Quezada, Charlie Weber, Kaylee Bryant, Noel G, Bourke Floyd, Madeleine Guilbot, George Akram, Livia Treviño, Emily Rose David, Tom Wright and Ving Rhames   Distributor: Screen Media

Grade: C

It’s the old “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” gambit that drives Nicolas Harvard’s feature directorial debut after a long career as an assistant director.  “The Locksmith” boasts a good cast but a weak script, winding up as a would-be modern film noir weighed down by genre clichés and some absurdities of its own.

Ryan Phillippe stars as putative hero Miller Graham, who’s introduced breaking into a safe with his nervous partner Kevin Reyes (George Akram) while crooked cop Ian Zwick (Jeffrey Nordling), the mastermind behind the heist, waits outside.  When the thieves unwittingly set off an alarm, Zwick kills Kevin to protect himself from suspicion and takes Miller into custody, warning him to take the rap if he doesn’t want his wife Beth (Kate Bosworth) and their baby daughter to be targeted. Zwick becomes a hero for supposedly foiling the crime he actually instigated.

Ten years later Miller’s released from prison; he’s greeted by his old mentor Frank (Ving Rhames), who’s gone straight and offers him a job in his locksmith shop.  Miller’s goal is to reconnect his Beth, now his ex, and daughter Lindsay (Madeleine Guilbot), and hopefully make a new life with them. 

But of course he’s not allowed to ignore the past.  Slimy Zwick, now a lieutenant, visits to say that he’s retiring, and introduces his corrupt detectives Perez and Jones (Noel G and Bourke Floyd), who rough Miller up as a reminder to keep his mouth shut.  Another visitor is April (Gabriela Quezada), Kevin’s sister, now a call girl who begs him to help her steal half a million from her cruel boss, real estate mogul and poker game impresario Fields (Charlie Weber), so she can escape and start a new life.  Of course Fields’s security detail is composed of Zwick and his crooked cops.

As if this weren’t complicated enough, it just so happens that Beth is a police detective serving under Zwick, who before he leaves the force transfers her to Vice as a partner with Perez and Jones; they, as he menacingly says, will “watch her back.”

The further convolutions of the plot won’t be disclosed here, but it’s not unfair to note that while in most old pulp novels the protagonist is rather dim, Miller Graham is a positive lunkhead, making choices that invariably turn out badly for himself and those he’s close to, although it does turn out that his decision to teach Lindsay how to pick a lock proves useful when the kid is kidnapped in the closing reel.  A major revelation about one of the characters toward the close comes out of left field, but not in an especially convincing fashion.  And when poor Phillippe must utter to that character a line so overused nowadays that it should henceforth be forbidden to every scriptwriter—“You don’t have to do this!”—you might be unable to stifle a guffaw.

The movie does exhibit a heaping helping of chutzpah toward the close, moreover, when it includes a few scenes from a classic of the genre—Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil,” also about crooked cops—on a television screen.  Deliberately drawing a comparison that’s bound to be invidious is a choice as bad as the ones Miller so frustratingly makes.

Still, as silly as the plot gets, Phillippe, always a good trooper, treats it with a seriousness it hardly deserves.  When Frank says to Miller at one point, “I’m trying to understand how you could get yourself involved in something like this,” you might imagine that it’s Rhames making the remark to Phillippe.  Yet the same might be said to Rhames, or Bosworth; their roles are no less thankless, but both strain to make their characters credible.  Further down the cast list, Nordling is an odious villain, and Weber no less a contemptible one.  Quezada, on the other hand, struggles in a role that makes little sense.  But Guilbot is a pleasant kid who holds her own against the adults.  On the technical side, Kassandra DeAngelis’ production design and Jeff Bierman’s cinematography give the New Mexico-shot images a properly noirish feel, and Lori Ball edits things down to a tolerable ninety minutes, though even at that some sequences lag.  Marlena Sheetz’s score isn’t as intrusive as those in many of these B-movies.

Still, the best one can say of “The Locksmith” is that it isn’t as bad as it might have been.