The Cave (DVD)

...miles of caves deep underneath the ruins of a 13th century abbey, they realise that they need a team of specialists to explore the undiscovered waterways. Jack, his brother Tyler and an assorted team of experts are the best in the business and with funding secured, they travel to the Balkans to join the expedition. The trip is fraught with danger. The team believes that nobody has ever navigated the underwater passages before them and must tread ...
...carefully mapped and plotted before the expedition progresses.

But the team is not alone. Strange carvings inside the ancient ruin tell stories of strange creatures and deep in the dark the divers are being watched. When a freak accident leads to a rockfall, their exit is blocked and they are forced to go further into the tunnels to try and find another way out. It's deep, it's damp and it's very, very dangerous…..

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When a group of scientists discovers a network of miles of caves deep underneath the ruins of a 13th century abbey, they realise that they need a team of specialists to explore the undiscovered waterways. Jack, his brother Tyler and an assorted team of experts are the best in the business and with funding secured, they travel to the Balkans to join the expedition. The trip is fraught with danger. The team believes that nobody has ever navigated the underwater passages before them and must tread water carefully. Using the very latest technology, each cavern is carefully mapped and plotted before the expedition progresses.

But the team is not alone. Strange carvings inside the ancient ruin tell stories of strange creatures and deep in the dark the divers are being watched. When a freak accident leads to a rockfall, their exit is blocked and they are forced to go further into the tunnels to try and find another way out. It's deep, it's damp and it's very, very dangerous…..

If you enjoyed The Descent, then you'll probably hate The Cave. If you liked Alien Vs Predator, you'll see dislike The Cave. In fact, if you like any half-decent movie, then the chances are that The Cave will leave you cold. Trailing in the shadows of the year's most triumphant (and thoroughly British!) horror (The Descent), The Cave was always going to struggle to be any good. A straight to video release path may have justified its paltry existence, but instead, it hit the multiplex first off and therefore it has to stand up to the best that cinema can offer. And it doesn't have the legs for it for very long.

The Cave is indistinguishably American and I'm afraid that doesn't do it any favours. For the diving team, the risk of drowning is eclipsed only by the risk of suffocating in testosterone and stupidity, and that's both in front and behind the camera.

Visually, the director (Bruce Hunt) tries hard to be grand - and often succeeds. Having previously worked on Dark City and all three Matrix movies, Hunt certainly has an eye for big-scale action movies in dark settings. It's just as well when your setting is several miles underground and several feet underwater. Feeling at times like a National Geographic documentary, the Cave is filled with enormous cavern settings, spectacular rock formations and twisting, turning passages that lead to who knows what. But the whole things suffers from being so grandiose and the first victim is actually the shred of possibility that The Cave could be tense, shortly followed by each of the wretched characters. In The Descent, Neil Marshall expertly drove the audience almost to insanity with sheer claustrophobia before launching an even greater terror onto them when they weren't expecting it. In The Cave, Hunt completely fails in any attempt to do this, even mustering a feeble attempt at a "Jaws-esque" scene of underwater tension that the divers may be sharing their pool water with something else. It's all so clumsy, it's almost depressing that one man could seem to go to so much trouble and could succeed in so little.

But it doesn't stop there. Packed with every cliché under the sun, the cast once again falls into a line-up of usual "action movie" suspects. The leader of the pack is a square-jawed, no-nonsense jock with a twinkle in his eye and a big tool in his trousers. He and his brother have issues (cue bickering and confused decision-making) for reasons unknown (or required.) The beautiful female scientist is both brainy and helpless and perpetually in need of both rescue and a good slap. There is the dark, steely black guy, loyal to the end and quick to tell everyone to get the f***on with it. There is the loud mouthed wild card, eager to suggest that the leader is making a mistake, without coming up with any better ideas himself. There is the Eastern European intellectual, quick to point out the obvious and quicker still to die horribly at the hands of who knows what. If it sounds like every other horror / action / monster flick, then that's probably because it is exactly like every other horror / action / monster flick, except some of those were harder, grittier and much, much better.

By way of a short prelude set earlier in the century, the audience actually knows from the outset that someone has been here before. Therefore, some of the surprises awaiting the divers offer no surprises to us. Instead, the action seems to take forever and a day to crank up, as though the director is frightened to play his final hand in case we all just shrug our shoulders, get up and walk out half-way through. He would be wise to be nervous, because he doesn't play a very good hand. I must be getting a bit hardened to these things now because the explanation of "what lurks below" is painfully obvious pretty much from the outset, and everything pans out in a "slaughter by numbers" kind of way that bores you senseless within minutes. Nobody seems to be able to make up their mind whether the beasties can fly, swim, crawl, run or all four and whether they're blind, deaf, mute, stupid or a combination of the lot. Again, in The Descent, Neil Marshall is quick to equip our heroines with the knowledge that their hunters hunt solely on the back of one sense. In The Cave, Hunt seems to just throw a coin in the air and hope for the best. The result being that everyone just runs / swims around screaming and not making much sense. The special effects don't really help. Whilst not being particularly shoddy, they certainly fail to impress and the computer-generated monsters look like a mish-mash of bits from countless other modern monster flicks.

As a horror film, The Cave is a pretty weak-hearted effort, a problem hinted at by the alarming 12a-certificate and proven throughout the running time. The cameraman appears to be epileptic, as the damn thing jumps all over the place and any attempt to actually focus on what's going on is pretty much impossible. Everything is dreadfully predictable. True to form people left on their own, refusing to take instruction or generally being rather irritating are highly likely to be in peril and it's always a question of when rather than if. With few surprises up his sleeve, Hunt struggles to keep the audience excited and settles himself instead to leave us guessing who will survive and what will be left of them. (Sorry, wrong film.) Occasionally, he starts to show some promise. A rock climbing attack scene works quite well, due largely to the fact that it involves one of the few characters in the whole piece that you really would prefer not to get eaten.

And here's where the final nail is hammered resoundingly into the coffin. You really couldn't care less about the team of divers or what's happening to them. In fact, you really wish the monsters would get them quicker. Jack (Cole Hauser), the leader is as inspiring as a cotton wool ball. With single facial expression and monotonous voice, he's a weak leading man indeed. His brother Tyler (Eddie Cibrian) may be utterly gorgeous, but eye candy alone simply cannot save the film. Scientist Kathryn (Lena Headley) brings up the rear for the Brits, but she seems so completely disinterested in the whole thing that it soon wears off on the audience. Rick Ravanello (as trouble-maker Briggs) is another hunky, superficial B-list actor who seems to have been in everything (CSI, Desperate Housewives, Stargate SG-1, Millenium, The Outer Limits and 24 to name but a few) and excelled in nothing. The rest of the cast is too uninteresting to even merit an individual mention.

The Cave is definitely evidence for the Prosecution in the charge against Hollywood that it simply cannot come up with anything new. A brazen, clumsy rehash of about 15 other films, it only ever feels like a weak attempt to make a bit of money. It really doesn't have any standout, redeeming feature or moment that would make you see it in a different light. It may play to the suggestion that deep in the earth's bowels lie horrors untold, but all it really tells you is that there are some things that have just about been done to death. Yes, indeed, there are some things that just shouldn't be awakened.

Not recommended
 

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