Diving In

My review was written in January 1991 after watching the movie on Paramount video cassette.

"Diving In" is a preposterous but entertaining sports film about would-be Olympic divers. Released theatrically by Skouras, it should generate some greenbacks for Paramount in video release.

Casting of Burt Young as the high school diving team coach hints at the cliches to come in yet another "Rocky"-inspired battle against the odds. Unfortunately, scripter Eric Edson has concocted some ridiculous motivations and untimely plot twists that reduce an otherwise competent production to silliness.

Matt Adler is the prototypical underdog who wants to prove himself as a diver to defeat Young's arrogant protege Matt Lattanzi but is afraid of the high platform. He gets girls' swimming coach Yolanda Jilot (a European beauty) to train him after hours at her home, with the expected May/December romantic overtones.

So far so good, but Edson piles on the melodrama to ill effect. Not only is Adler running against Lattanzi for class president, but Adler's beautiful sister Kristy Swanson is sexually abused by the oversexed Lattanzi at a party, and her honor needs avenging.

As if this weren't enough, at the last minute Jilot brings in ace coach Richard Johnson (a comeback for the distinguished British actor) as Adler's tutor. At the state championship swimming meet, Adler is way behind when suddenly Johnson concocts a tough dive on the spot, asks the boy to do it and gets the judges to arbitrarily assign a 3.6 degree of difficulty. Adler nails it and is the victor.

Cast of hunks and 10s does a fine job, and pic benefits from a quite liberal PG-13 rating that includes a surprising number of nude scenes. Jilot in particular is convincing as an athlete, and elsewhere the cutaways to doubles for diving footage are well handled.

The back of the box equates the plot to the Karate Kid, and that's exactly what it is. Adler plays Wayne Hopkins, a kid on the swim team who wants to become a diver, except he has a fear of heights. Hopkins thinks that to defeat his fear of diving, means he can also conquer other fears, like that of the rival diver on his team and his gang of braindead lackees. Burt Young, who plays the boy's diving coach doesn't want to train Hopkins, he wants to stick with his star because he's sure that this kid is going to qualify as an Olympic diver. Hopkins goes for the former Olympic diver who now coaches the girls swim team for help, and she helps him out. And blah...blah...blah...persistence saves the day.

Okay, so overall the movie is kind of lame. The plot of the whimpy kid struggling for a few weeks and attaining his goal, beating the crap out of his rivals, has been done so many times ad nauseum. Its the Karate Kid, its Vision Quest, its Youngblood, and so on and so forth...and oddly much of this theme is prevalent in the 1980s. However, I checked out this movie because Matt Adler (the guy who plays Lewis in Teen Wolf) is the lead, Wayne Hopkins. He was in another movie called North Shore, which is about this kid from the wave tank in Arizona who goes to Hawaii to become some great surfer that surfs in the Pipeline Classic (with an added subplot of bitter rivals and the beautiful girl). This movie is another sports cliche/Romeo and Juliet theme, but hey, it is a lot more exciting than this film and plus, its got great photography. So, when you're in the video store because I doubt cable television runs anything good or rare anymore...think diving in...or north shore...eeeny meeny miney mo...and then go for North Shore, a more appreciable, though somewhat lame, Adler film.