Voyage

An all-too-rare opportunity to see two titans of straight-to-tape gurning, grimacing, and hamming it up in tandem: Rutger Hauer, who looks like on-set his trailer must have doubled as a cake shop, and Eric Roberts, still wearing the permanently huffy expression of a man whose little sister Julia could buy and sell him any time she wanted. For anyone who's ever seen Phillip Noyce's trashy but entertaining 1989 sea-bound thriller Dead Calm, Voyage is basically exactly the same film, only with Hauer and Roberts in lieu of Sam O'Neill and Billy Zane (which actually doesn't sound like such an unfair trade).

For the benefit of everybody else, the storyline centres around happily married couple Morgan and Catherine Norvell (Hauer and Karen Allen), who have recently decided to abandon their respective careers and sail off together around Europe. However, a few days before leaving the shore, the pair meet the delightful Gail and Ronnie Freeland (Roberts and Connie Nielson). The two couples bond, share a few laughs and, before you know it, Morgan and Catherine have invited their new best friends aboard. The rest is, of course, a masterclass in dark secrets, latent psychosis and as little exposition as possible before the ostensibly thrilling climax. Not so much derivative as carbon copied from its predecessor, Voyage offers nothing in the way of originality, but the direction--by a slumming John Mackenzie (director of the classic British gangster flick The Long Good Friday)--is surprisingly fluent. If nothing else, the sight of a chunky Hauer floating around the water in his T-shirt--presumably out of reluctance to remove it for the camera--is a thing of pure comic wonder. --Danny Leigh