John Stockwell, who established himself as the master chronicler of bikini-clad high jinks with Blue Crush and Into the Blue, turns out to be largely inept at thrillers. He manages to build some suspense as the group await their fate in Zamora's deserted house, but the climactic chase sequence is repetitious and visually incoherent; the protracted underwater scenes, in which it's impossible to tell who's pursuing whom, are particularly frustrating.
Where Stockwell really flubs it, though, is in his obliviousness to the boneheaded racism and classism in screenwriter Michael Ross' story. This indifference gives credence to the director's claim that he was attracted to Turistas after being robbed at gunpoint while touring Peru: The movie smacks of knee-jerk race hatred unleavened by reflection, and suggests that Stockwell never seriously questioned his right to be in the neighborhood in which he was mugged in the first place.
About the best that can be said of Turistas, unfortunately, is that it wears this xenophobia on its slobbery sleeve. There's no attempt to mitigate it with a white European setting (à la Hostel) or subvert it via ostensible Yank self-criticism (as in Alexandre Aja's obtuse for-hire remake of The Hills Have Eyes); its most bloodthirsty characters are invariably its swarthiest and most impoverished, while its savior is the bland, tight-ass Stockwell surrogate Duhamel. Forget Borat—this is the year's most culturally insensitive movie hands down, and Brazilians should be lining up to sue.
Just as depressing, though, is Turistas' lack of consistent, guilt-free scares. It cynically applies the same audio-visual shock tactics as every other lackluster Hollywood fright film from the last few years, as if to placate increasingly undemanding fans who have yet to figure out—or just don't care—that there's nothing inherently terrifying about fake death and dismemberment. I'm at a loss as to what might constitute a genuine horror movie these days—we may well have become too real-fear saturated for simulacra to do the trick—but I do know that Turistas isn't it. Scarier by far is that sociopathic, artistically bankrupt films like this one continue to feed our loathing and distrust of other cultures back to us in ever-more grisly helpings, and that few moviegoers seem to mind.