Side Out (1990)

Side Out (1990) Directed by Peter Israelson

A very physical, sweaty, anodyne sports flick. Although Peter Israelson’s splashy Side Out is about beach volleyball, its athletic panorama is not about physical prowess but about physical sexiness. Seen from a distance it’s superficial filmmaking, seen up close it is too, but Israelson’s nonsensical movie has one of the coolest cinematic façades of Californian beach culture.

C. Thomas Howell plays Monroe Clark, a law student who moves to Los Angeles to work with his wealthy uncle at one of the city’s big law firms. But the sweltering atmosphere of the partying, sultry Hermosa and Manhattan beach areas distracts him long enough to swap his square lawyer’s attire for comfy swimwear, his pompous legalese for groovy, juvenile jargon, and ultimately his lucrative job as a lawyer for a professional volleyball player. Monroe teams up with Zack Barnes (Peter Horton), one of the great local volleyball legends, to compete in a major pro volleyball tournament.

The interminable musical pizzazz that accompanies a very strange form of montage parataxis – vistas of glistening sun-kissed bodies, inviting bikini landscapes, sizzling volleyball matches, a beautiful sweeping coastal view and a specious idyllic athletic lifestyle – specifies more the artless appeal of a beach beer commercial than a sports movie with pretty faces. And when the corny dialogue aims for character introspection, it is unwisely interrupted and overshadowed by more corporeal flashiness and hollow clichés that detract from the humanity and depth of the prosaic characters, leaving more models than actors in plain sight. Nevertheless, the contrivances work, the film is a bracing escapism – it’s the epitome of ’90s cheesy cinema. And C. Thomas Howell along with Courtney Thorne-Smith, the romantic interest in the film, are stupidly adorable, just enough to be effortlessly annoying and endearing without being cloyingly cute. Side Out delivers what it promises: a beach volleyball movie that honors the actual volleyball-playing bodies more than the actual game.

The last film from the ephemeral Aurora Productions, Side Out is the kind of movie that could only exist in the carefree generational zeitgeist of 90’s cinema. A fiasco in theaters but a hit in video stores, Side Out is memorable only for its pop celebration of manly fraternity and its blatant tourist advertisement of California’s sun-drenched beaches; everything else is unremarkable, though no less fun for that.