Take a moment to think about what you share on the Internet. I’m talking about the personal moments: innocuous photos of you and your friends at brunch, or video snippets from a day at the beach. Who do you let into that part of your world? Do you keep it within a closed network of confidants? Do you share it at all? How would you feel if someone collected years of private, mundane footage of you, and constructed it into a film? How would you feel if the person who did that was your dad? Well, that’s what happened with Surfer: Teen Confronts Fear.
As a director (and writer, actor, producer, and composer), Burke appears to have all the makings of someone capable of making a truly entertaining movie that fails to adhere to the most basic components of a good movie. His lack of self-awareness, inability to understand how to build a basic narrative, and what appears to be a strong desire to put himself front and center of a film that’s ostensibly about his son should, in theory, result in some genuine and unexpectedly enjoyable scenes. But while Surfer eventually shows some forward momentum when Sage meets his dad’s old military buddy, Banks (Gerald James, the only person onscreen who appears to have critically evaluated what it means to be an actor), it remains a sputtering, hollow mess occasionally brought to life by a stray incidental detail.
