Soundtrack Review: 'Surf’s Up'

By Jeff Swindoll Jun 20, 2007, 13:52 GMT

Penguins, real or computer-generated, are hot property in Hollywood. First came "March of the Penguins," then "Happy Feet," and now "Surf\'s Up." If it\'s gotten easy to confuse one penguin flick for another, though, mistaking their soundtracks is pretty much impossible, owing to the top-tier talent. Surf\'s Up, like Happy Feet before it, catapults kiddie soundtracks to a new level of cool by recruiting a never-before-heard track from an artist ...more

If Penguins care about such things as box office it appears that Surf’s Up might’ve been a wipeout since it came in fifth in opening weekend box office receipts.  The movie is about a penguin named Cody (Shia LaBeouf) who wants to be a surfing champion (guess you didn’t know that penguins invented both tuxedos and surfing?). 

He has to compete with the vain Tank (Diedrich Bader) and the seemingly stoned (in a kid’s movie?) Chicken Joe (Jon Heder).  His love interest is Lani (Zooey Deschanel), gets inspiration from the Geek (Jeff Bridges), and there’s also surfing promoter Reggie (James Woods).  From that I’ve seen, the film takes a different approach in that it’s shot like a documentary with interviews with the animated characters. 

The only song that I could tell was written for the film is ‘Reggae Got Soul’ by 311, which as several of the character’s names in it.  There are quite a lot of surfing themed songs ranging from ‘Big Wave’ by Pearl Jam to ‘Hawaiian War Chant (Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai)’ by Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys. 

Though the movie might not have scored big at the box office this weekend, the soundtrack has some good tunes on it.  Unlike some of the other kid’s films this one takes modern (and some older) music and doesn’t have too many film themed songs (the first one was the only one). 

I thought the soundtrack was a good mixture of tunes.  Hang ten. 

'Surf’s Up' is now available at Amazon. Visit the soundtrack database for more infomration.