Cliffs for hang gliding drop to rock-cut beaches, the ocean is wet-suit cold year-round, with rough waves, frequent dangerous riptides, and lots of surfers. Quite by accident, that small town where I hung my hat for over two decades was among Europe's few surfing capitals and one year even the site of the world championships. Not Hawaii or Tahiti, nor California nor Australia, the place was principally a provincial farming town turned urban bedroom and only second- or thirdly a surfing mecca, though it has long had its three or four specialized shops and blond Aussies in vans passing through, sometimes settling in and staying.

The town, and the entire coast, remained what it was, with surfing and the whole culture it drags behind, accepted but never dominant. Though kids in summer might affect the loose, colorful style of dress, for farmers and yuppies that world of waves, boards, wax and bright clothing never was an obsession. So, in spite of those many years, Step into Liquid is as foreign to me as to most. Touting its subject as "not a lifestyle but a life" -- "the only life, the only way," wrote Brian Wilson and Mike Love -- in the end the film fails to involve or convince us. Gidget (1959) is cited, along with its true-life inspirational heroine, and also, negatively, the later Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but this "2,000-year-old pastime become a multi-billion-dollar industry" actually came to profitable respectability with the Beach Boys and Bruce Brown's successful, amusingly narrated (by Big Kahuna Brown) 1966 The Endless Summer. Nearly three decades later, that director collaborated with son Dana Brown on The Endless Summer 2. Now the son sets out more or less on his own as director, writer and editor, to film surfers in widely scattered, sometimes wholly unexpected places, revisiting in the process a few famous practitioners made famous through the first two films.

Even though the second father-and-son effort explored scenery and a subculture grown overexploited and familiar by 1994, pros Pat O'Connell and Robert "Wingnut" Weaver's search for perfect waves, plus a big budget and consequent more sophisticated technique, still carried the film and the viewer.

However, this fourth big-screen installment -- aside from his and others' numerous TV episodes, Dana Brown has also done Endless Summer Revisited -- just doesn't make it. "Dude," "hot-doggers," "hang ten," "tubes," "stoked" and so on grow unimaginatively repetitious. De rigueur nods to updated political correctness are thin and forced: surfing makes poor Asian children joyful, brings together Catholic and Protestant youngsters in Ireland, and freely opens its doors to women athletes (none of ES2's topless beach bunnies here!); a war veteran's wave-quest return to Vietnam, with his son, inadvertently and ironically chills like Apocalypse Now and is not a booster for the sport.

Billed as a "surf adventure film," this effort is too choppy and non-continuous. The tanned, enthusiastic interviewees do not attract us because, first of all, none is allowed enough screen time to reveal levels that may (or may not) be there, and, secondly, leisured and/or wealthy surfers do not elicit natural sympathy in the way that, say, leisured and/or wealthy mountain climbers might.

Lacking both depth in characters and narrative continuity, pseudo-travelogues like this must delight the eye (and ear). To snatches of forgettable Modern Rock, flat-surfing behind Gulf Coast supertankers or on small dirt-brown Great Lakes waves or foil boards may show the sport's appeal in unlikely circumstances, but non-connoisseur audiences are moved -- maybe "stoked"-- only by thrilling rides above or along crashing Pacific monsters, and while eighty-eight minutes of only that would be more than one could stand, here there simply isn't enough.

Aside, in fact, from a few minutes' footage of such amazing man/woman wave-riding, a couple seconds of beautiful emerald green-blue water, underused and unusual underwater-to-surface camerawork, some ominous big ocean sounds and a sunset on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), there isn't enough here to meet the eye.

(From Top Secret Productions; not rated by MPAA.)