Director: Daniel Grodnik
Year: 2004
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Shark
Plot:
Working for a special military contract, a scientist and her ex-husband are attempting to engineer Great White Sharks only for an accident during the demonstration causing the sharks to get loose and forcing them to track both the sharks and the government operative on the project using the sharks for their personal gain.
Review:
There are very few good qualities about this film. The best quality is the fact that the film actually has some occasionally funny bits, as practically any scene with their dwarf of a boss or the incessant complaining about the status of their marriage, provide some choice comedic moments every now and then. The opening sequence is perhaps as good as it gets in the suspense and scariness categories and actually gets the biggest death in the film chewing off the one victims’ arm. It's appropriate enough for a good bang opening, which makes it far more memorable than later on. Other than those two things, there isn't much else in here.
As much as I wanted to like this, there are several factors here that doom this beyond all hope. For a film about a group of killer sharks, it's almost unforgivable to have fewer kills than the number of sharks in the group. That's what happens here. And there isn't a huge number of sharks in the group, either, and there were plenty of opportunities for the sharks to get some more kills in. There are numerous scenes of them gathering around a potential victim only for them to be saved at the last moment or the sharks are diverted away from the prey and they are able to escape. It grew frustrating after the third such encounter, seeing as how it's hard to generate much fear in a creature that can't kill any unsuspecting prey.
That alone is a major obstacle to get over, as is the cliché manner of the script. Everything in here has been covered before in other, better films. There are at least a dozen films this steal elements from on display here, from the failure to notice the Army figure controlling the strings, locking up the innocents when they’re trying to do the right thing, shark vision swarming around victims in the water and that's just giving a quick cursory glance. Looking harder, there's probably a good dozen or more that it steals from. This just feels repetitive, and for a sub-genre that doesn't offer much originality to begin with, that's another major strike against it.
The death blow, however, is the rating. All of this could've been forgivable had the few attacks it had been incredibly gory and featured lots of blood. Sadly, there's nothing in here at all worthy of being called gory, and it's hard to even call the film violent. Take out some language bits and this could go down a further notch. It doesn't even matter that the love interest took up most of the first half, negating the sharks to the second half or that they look as some of the most unconvincing creations from a computer, it could've been at least decent. But that there alone kills the film more than it's other major two problems.
Overview: */5
An overall incredibly boring shark film with very few redeeming factors to help it along, it's all been seen before, and the rating does it no help in trying to generate any kind of excitement or interest. Only see this if you're afraid of sharks or need to see every one of them ever made, but otherwise don't really bother with this one and stick to the other entries in the genre.
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