Step Into Liquid writer, director, and narrator Dana Brown has never met a surfer he didn't like. The son of surf-documentary king Bruce Brown, who executive produced, he gives the surf world a big, wet, sloppy kiss in the form of a documentary that approaches its subject with gushing, uncritical adulation. Filmgoers expecting at least the faintest hint of journalistic objectivity will likely be horrified, but dopey surfumentaries like Step Into Liquid aren't about hard-hitting critical analysis or an objective recounting of facts: They're about the aesthetic pleasure of watching gleaming, hard-bodied surfers riding monster waves. The astonishing visual poetry of Step Into Liquid's best surfing footage nearly compensates for the mindless boosterism of Brown's constant narration and the often comically banal observations of the film's largely homogeneous master surfers. Driven by an almost religious belief in the inherent goodness of surfing, Step Into Liquid travels the globe, touching down in places as disparate as Vietnam, Wisconsin, Ireland, and Rapa Nui, where it invariably discovers that surfers are awesome, goodhearted, fun-loving people. At one point, a note of non-grooviness threatens to be struck when Brown admits he used to think female surfers had a chip on their shoulders, but that potential flicker of negativity is averted when he discovers that female surfers are just as terrific as their counterparts. Short on structure and chronology but long on guileless happy talk about the magic of surfing, Step Into Liquid imparts little knowledge about its subject's evolution and history. Essentially a long, handsomely filmed infomercial, it never removes its trembling lips from surfing's bronzed posterior, but it delivers enough of the goods visually that the choir it's preaching to shouldn't mind.