10 years ago, AC (Justin Hartley) has lost his mother (Daniella
Wolters) in a freak plane accident over the Bermuda Triangle, one he only
survived because he was saved by whales. Since then, he has been able to
speak to whales and dolphins, and he can swim real fast too, I mean
fighter-jet fast. Nowadays, AC makes his living as a diving teacher, but
he has never stopped to wonder about his origins. Then a fighter jet
crashes over the Bermuda Triangle, just where his mother did, and AC
manages to save the pilot (Denise Quinones) from drowning, hoping to get
some answers from her, but she is soon taken into custody by a shady
gouvernment organisation. AC meets Siren (Adrianne Palicki), a very sexy
blonde who agrees to have sex in the sea with him all too quickly ... and
once in the sea, she turns into a monster and tries to kill him, only to
be chased away by the local lighthouse keeper McCaffery (Ving Rhames),
who's conveniently armed with a crossbow. McCaffery gives AC a
crashcourse concerning his origins: He is the son of the king and queen of
Atlantis, but was brought to land by his mother when daddy was overthrown.
The present rulers of Atlantis want to take over the upper world, and it's
up to AC to keep the surface dwellers and the Atlanteans apart. Not quite
an easy task, because some Atlanteans want him dead simply because he's
the crown prince, and one of these Atlanteans is Siren, who soon launches
a full-on attack on AC and takes out his girlfriend (Amber McDonald) - but
this time, AC is prepared, and helped by McCaffery, and eventually the two
of them manage to kill Siren ... Lou Diamond Phillips plays AC's
adoptive coast guard father. Officially based on the DC
Comics-series of the same name, this intended TV-pilot actually
tries to be more of a mix of popular TV-series Baywatch, X-Files
and Lost - and somehow manages to live up to neither.
Basically, this pilot tries a bit too hard to create some sort of mystery
on one hand, on the other falls flat on its face by laying out the
mystery's solution bare in front of us early on in the movie. So what
we're left with then is a run-of-the-mill action plot with some
run-of-the-mill CGI effects, done in a run-of-the-mill way and carried by
a lead actor who seriously lacks charisma. And once the thing is over, it
quite simply doesn't leave you hungering for more, it just gives you this
"been there, done that" feel that kills an intended series dead
on arrival.
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