WATERLOGGED

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THEY WHINE ABOUT THEIR NEglectful, misunderstanding parents. They are snotty with one another and sullen in the face of authority. Sometimes they are arrogant, sometimes they are wimpish, all the time they are horny. They are, in short, 1960s preppies, tiresome enough at the time and hardly less so in retrospect.

The man charged with making men out of them in White Squall is Christopher Sheldon (Jeff Bridges), skipper of the Albatross, a sailing ship he has turned into a floating secondary school. He's the sort of father figure these chinless wonders have never had--stern but caring, and at one with the winds and the waves. Also, he seems to have the ability to tell them apart, a matter on which Todd Robinson's script--not to mention the casting director--is not very helpful. Sheldon's promise is that after a year of crewing with him, all the nonsense will be knocked out of them.

This happens with tedious predictability. Then comes the title weather disturbance. It's predictable too, though excitingly staged by director Ridley Scott. It does not, however, sweep away quite as many of the boys as one would like. Thereafter comes an investigation of Sheldon's seamanship, during which the survivors rally to his defense. The movie climaxes with a manly group hug.

This is, or was, a true story, but invested as it is with relentlessly cliched emotions, it plays like cheap fiction. What a sometime visionary like Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise) is doing mixed up with it is hard to fathom. Or maybe it isn't. In today's cautious Hollywood, a seasick Dead Poets Society probably looks daring.

--By Richard Schickel