If it weren't for the stunning footage of surfing in this film, it wouldn't even be worth writing about, let alone watching.
The writing, dialogue and story, is so ghastly, it's difficult to tell what Zalman King was thinking. Does he hate the sport? Did he realize that the highly polished, kinetically charged surfing sequences would have made a great documentary, and so he decided to show his contempt for them by slapping on empty-headed melodrama?
In the beginning there's some ludicrous high jinks in some African country (name of the country? I don't know -- New Orleans, I think, or maybe Hong Kong), followed by some scenes aboard a freighter (a freighter with no discernable purpose, manned by a crew of three), followed by a sequence at a surfer training camp (?), followed by scenes wherein one of the main characters gets struck down with a terrible sickness (yellow fever? small pox? heat cramps?), and then gets well. It ends with a bunch of surfing followed by a bunch of surfing.
The dialogue is hollowed-out, cheesy ersatz Kerouac, mostly from a fellow who talks into a tape recorder for some vague future purpose (Dennis Hopper in "The American Friend," anyone?)
On the upshot, if there was money spent on anything for "In God's Hands," it was the film stock and the cameras. Rarely has cinematography been this glisteningly, unabashedly beautiful, without a specific color scheme suited to the story (i.e. war movies, westerns). It rivals anything John Toll achieved in his photography for "The Thin Red Line." In the end, however, this film is reduced to being a ninety-six minute screen saver, and belongs in the same trash bin as Hype Williams' "Belly" and Claude Lelouche's "A Man and a Woman."
