Movie Review : ‘Endless’ a Triumphant Return to the Waves of Summer : Two friends retrace the globe-trotting path that their surfing counterparts took nearly 30 years ago.

In “The Endless Summer II,” creator-narrator Bruce Brown takes pains to tell us how much has changed since he began filming his definitive surfing movie, “The Endless Summer,” 30 years ago. He takes pride in the international popularity of the sport he helped popularize and ticks off its various innovations. He does not shy away from showing how crowded some Hawaiian beaches now are or how the once-deserted beach at a still-choice surfing spot near Capetown, South Africa, is now covered with expensive condos and tract houses. To his credit, he makes a passing acknowledgment of polluted waters.

What Brown is really doing, however, is shrewdly getting such matters out of the way in order to celebrate all that mercifully hasn’t yet changed: fabulous beaches that attract world-class surfers to ride the most spectacular waves. Brown’s conceit is that a couple of likable young surfer pals, Robert (Wingnut) Weaver--he has the dark hair--and the blond Patrick O’Connell, are such fans of the original “Endless Summer” that they dip into some surfing prize money to finance a globe-girdling retracing, more or less, of their surfing counterparts in the first film, Robert August and Mike Hynson, who were in search of the perfect wave.

While it’s anybody’s guess if Brown’s mix of awesome surfing sequences interspersed with travelogue material and good-natured cornball antics will play as well as it did decades ago, this “Endless Summer” is no less endearing than the original. That this sequel is as fresh as it is is probably in large part due to the fact that Brown deliberately backed off from further surfer movies after making the first “Endless Summer” (which was part of an entire cycle of surfer epics, all the others lesser efforts).

Working with far more sophisticated equipment this time out, Brown, backed by a large crew, once again displays a sense of the visual that’s in key with the ebb and flow of the waves. Indeed, what makes both films work is that in their friendly, unpretentious way they celebrate man coming into harmony with nature in truly beautiful images.

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Wingnut and Pat’s journey takes them from Southern California to Costa Rica (which Brown intercuts with side trips to Alaska and Hawaii not involving his stars), to France, South Africa, Fiji, Australia, Bali and Java, which from the looks of it just might be the most glorious, unspoiled place to surf on the face of the globe.

Along the way Wingnut and Pat meet champion surfers like Tom Curren (in Biarritz) and Laird Hamilton and Gerry Lopez (in Java). They also meet several men from the first film, hearty rugged types like Capetown’s John Whitmore and Brisbane’s Nat Young, a veritable Crocodile Dundee, who takes Wingnut and Pat riding the rapids in a rubber raft.

Accompanied by Gary Hoey and Phil Marshall’s driving score, “The Endless Summer II” is such a pleasure to watch, so effective in its ability to take you away and into the healthy, carefree world of surfing, at once exciting and uncomplicated, that you’re actually sorry when it’s over.

* MPAA rating: PG, for brief nudity and mild language. Times guidelines: The brief nudity consists of some passing glances at topless female bathers; the language is a couple of cusswords. ‘The Endless Summer II’

Robert (Wingnut) Weaver

Patrick O’Connell

A New Line presentation. Director Bruce Brown. Producers Ron Moler, Roger Riddell. Executive Micheal Harpster. Writers-editors Brown and Dana Brown. Cinematographer Mike Hoover. Executive music producers Joel Sill and Lonnie Sill. Music Gary Hoey and Phil Marshall. Running time: 2 hours.

* In general release throughout Southern California.