It isn't until the half hour mark when Captain Nemo appears for the first time that the movie finally ceases sounding like a scientific docudrama and more like a film that’s trying to tell an actual story with actual characters. Well, just an actual story - there's never much by way of characters. Come to think of it, there wasn't much of a story either. Nothing like a limp retelling of a classic undersea adventure that's missing the adventure part. What we have here is yet another Asylum production that's far more ambitious in concept than execution. Like their SUPERCROC earlier this year (REVIEW HERE), 30,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA is all talk and little action. But you will know when the action is happening because that's when the actors inhabiting the cramped sets will begin barking their lines, thus alerting us that something exciting is supposedly occurring.

The USS Abraham Lincoln nuclear submarine has gone down some 20,000+ leagues under the sea, the victim of what looks to be a cyborg squid. The opening minutes depicting this plays out like every scene in every movie you've ever seen where a submarine comes into contact with an unknown bogey deep below the ocean. It made me want to turn into an NFL ref and throw a penalty flag for excessive use of cliché and perfunctory dialogue.

Lorenzo Lamas and his magnificent deep-submersible wonder sub, the Aquanaut, then get called into duty by the youngest Navy Captain I've ever seen to try and rescue the crew of the sunken nuclear sub. Joining him and his tiny crew of nameless mouth breathers will be Lamas' somewhat estranged wife, a US Naval officer with a British accent who helped him develop their wonderful Aquanaut submersible. On the plus side, the romantic subplot is so minor it borders on being an afterthought.

So they all nearly die only to awaken aboard Captain Nemo's vast undersea vessel, The Nautilus. From here out its pretty much a talky updating of Jules Verne's classic novel with more of a poor man's Seaquest DSV bent to it. It's all about Nemo seeking to acquire this new invention that Lamas' character has invented called the Oxygenator, a device that can convert H20 into O2, precisely the sort of thing Nemo desperately needs to help finally make the undersea city he built inhabitable at long last.

FX wise, the film boasts unspectacular but perfectly acceptable for a low budget production of this type CGI. Problem is, again, they clearly couldn't afford enough of it to truly bring the action-adventure portions of the film to life. There's also very little humor, unless you count the laughable acting. The only decent performance is that of Sean Lawlor, an Irish actor who brings a classical Shakespearean feel to role of Captain Nemo; he swims circles around the rest of the cast, especially Lamas who's performance reeks of a guy who'd much rather be elsewhere.

All in all, there's nothing really wrong with 30,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA aside from it being a terribly uninteresting film. Amazing how a movie set almost entirely underwater could be so dry.

The film’s highlight for me was a throwaway scene where Captain Nemo is showing Mr. & Mrs. Aquanaut around his vast undersea vessel - at least the portions they could afford within budget to show - that's supposedly a city unto itself populated by a crew of who the hell knows how many. Turns out there's a racy nightclub aboard; a pair of Los Angeles model types come walking out of it and give Lamas a wink. This one moment led me to ponder many questions, not the least of which was as to how does Captain Nemo went about rounding up skanks for his ship's nightclub scene? Did he put out ads on the mainland for hot-looking club rats needed to entertain and "service" undersea crew members on a permanent basis? Or as we supposed to believe that these ladies are actually crew members, and if so, what positions (AHEM!) do they fill?