- Actors: Laird Hamilton
- Director: Rory Kennedy
- Format: Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
- Language: English
- Subtitles: Spanish, English
- Region: Region 1
- Number of discs: 1
- Rated: Not Rated
- Studio: MPI HOME VIDEO
- DVD Release Date: February 6, 2018
- Run Time: 118 minutes
Like its title, Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton is
overlong and makes it painfully clear who the subject of the documentary is.
Even with a number of scenes that have impressive staged and archived footage
of big-wave surfing, this film consistently remains a portrait of the legendary
surfer. I have to assume that he is a legend, anyway. As someone with little
knowledge about trailblazing surfers, I mostly just have this film as
reference, and it rarely feels like a balanced portrait of Hamilton, even when showing some of his major
character flaws.
The film gives
us the entire journey of Laird Hamilton, from his young days as a rambunctious
brat of a kid living on the beach in Hawaii,
to a high school dropout who only wanted to surf and stubbornly refused to
compromise in order to compete. After a period modeling and acting (but never
reaching success due to his poor work ethic), he became interested in big-wave
surfing, and developed a way to surf them with a group of close friends. Then
he abandoned and betrayed those friends when he was the only one to become
famous for what they had all perfected together. So, now he is the one rich and
famous with a documentary that is far too long just so that his name can me
included in it.
When responding to whether he regrets
the way he stepped on his closest friends to get where he is, he admits that it
was bad, but also says that he would do it all the same to get where he is now.
That’s the kind of moral Hamilton’s
story has, and this selfishness is also central to the story of his current
marriage, which was started during his last marriage. It is unfortunate that
the documentary chooses to quickly pass by these character flaws, instead
choosing endless praise for a majority of the lengthy two-hour run-time.
Much of the film
highlights the ego and arrogance of Hamilton, which Hamilton himself carefully
justifies as assets rather than flaws within his interviews. Both the constant
presence of modern-day Hamilton
in the documentary and a lack of counter-arguments to some of the more
controversial aspects of the man seem to drown the movie in bias that is
difficult to ignore. He may be a great surfer, but Take Every Wave did little to convince me that he is a good (or
even decent) man.
Even if this
entire film is a bit like the visual equivalent of reading a fan letter (or
worse yet, a love letter Hamilton
has written to himself), at least there are numerous scenes of awesome waves
and daredevils that ride them. Most of the modern footage is kind of weak,
because Hamilton
is getting pretty old and can’t even walk without arthritic issues in his hip,
instead choosing to focus on the tinkering he does with the surfboard design.
The narrative about the past also has a lot of the same tinkering, with Hamilton taking credit for
nearly every innovation since the invention of the board, but the film is far
more entertaining when he just gets in the water to ride the waves.
A lot of the
film’s best footage is archival, meaning that there is little cutting edge
surfing photography. Much of what is captured is from a distance, which makes
sense considering the waves he is best known for riding. More often than not,
the excitement of the footage only comes from the stories that the images are
paired with. The main message of nearly all of these stories is that surfing
can be extremely dangerous. But the photography of waves without surfers show a
beauty in the movement of the water as well, providing the film with a nice
visual dichotomy.
The DVD includes
no special features.
Entertainment Value:
6/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 6/10
Historical
Significance: 4/10
Special Features: 0/10
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