Having a low budget production is something that is very hard to hide when making a movie, especially if this is your first feature film. The noticeable details will often be a small cast, a single location, and cheap equipment or a less experienced crew. Same Boat from the first scene is clearly no a high budget film, let alone a blockbuster, so they are being clever in their use of characters and scenes. What comes across as a brilliant idea at first but slowly feeds into the bad aspects of a low budget movie is the entire plot of the film taking place on a cruise ship.

In the 29th century time traveling has been achieved and now there are time-traveling assassins. Sent through time to kill people to make the future better, senior agent James and his trainee Mat find their next assignment on a cruise ship in 2019. While Mat becomes immediately seasick and bedridden, James founds out the cruise is all-inclusive and decides to let loose. While enjoying himself he stops a man from killing himself and starts to flirt with a woman named Lily. While he starts to drift from his mission and instead have fun on the ship with Lily it soon becomes apparent that Lily is his target and he must decide between her and his job to protect the future.

If it feels like the first half of my synopsis of Same Boat sounds like a great movie and the second half feels like a tagged on day time television feature plot, I felt the same way. The film sets off with an interesting plot but becomes very clear by the 15-minute mark what the whole film going to be about, with little deviation. The cast are a bunch of quirky characters with little personality besides their one or two traits. Where James stopping the man from killing himself could have had its own effect on the future in an interesting way, the film instead focuses on the stale romance versus personal duty aspect. While the end has one or two surprises, it is little to distract from a shallow plot that has only a few glimmers of originality.

So having your low budget film set on a cruise ship offers plenty of opportunities to save on the budget, whether it be an interesting location that you don’t have to pay to shoot at or automatic housing and food for the crew. However, when the film has one-dimensional characters, poor dialogue, and handheld camera shots with little composition, the cruise seems less like a clever choice and more of obvious budgetary limitation. Long draw out shots of the ship with no dialogue only stress this point even further making it feel like the script could have been condensed into a short film.

The ending Same Boat, without giving away anything, has an incredible amount of charm, which is especially surprising from a film that starts to feel dragged out by the 45-minute mark. It was in the ending that I realized there is a good idea and interesting characters buried underneath all the fluff and footage of someone’s vacation to Keywest. It is just unfortunate that none of it was brought the surface until the last ten minutes and instead was left drowning in a sea of mediocrity.

4 out of 10