Director: Ben J. Williams
Year: 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Sharks
Plot:
Trying to get on with their lives, a group of London strangers find themselves stuck in the city with a severe storm system leaving everything trapped underwater and letting dozens of vicious man-eating sharks swarm the city looking for prey and forcing them to get out of the city alive.
Review:
This was a bit underwhelming but has some likable enough factors to it. Among its main enjoyable elements is the sense of action and excitement that comes about from the series of interactions and confrontations with the sharks in the flooded locations. That it tends to take place throughout the city offers some fun moments here with the characters discovering the seemingly unnatural situation of finding themselves completely overrun by water and having to navigate to safety from the massive sharks trying to get to them. This basic setup is overall fun enough to leave a series of solid if never inherently over-the-top scenarios involving sharks chasing them through their homes, inside parked cars located in garages, stuck inside restaurants, or even in apartments which have some generally goofy and cheesy confrontations at play. With the whole thing moving along swiftly due to the rapid pace making everything come together at a great pace, this one has a few positive points to it.
There are some big issues with this one that bring it down. The biggest drawback to this one is a wholly rushed storyline that never once feels as though anything has the kind of proper stakes necessary to make everything come off appropriately. The initial scenes of the group quickly going through their lives or meeting up with friends are then dismissed to get the weather event that’s dropped all the water on them bringing the sharks. It feels as though there’s no chance to get an idea of what’s going on before we’re dumped into the situation where they’re stuck in a flooded city with these sharks who just appeared out of nowhere so although the action in here is immensely fun and chilling on a basic survival level the rest of this one is feeling like a random assortment of scenes featuring characters running into sharks in a flooded city. That context is severely missing which is a big part of helping to add to the fear of a situation so being missing here does this a huge disservice. As well, there’s also the idea of the film being let down by the expectedly cheesy and cheap-looking CGI for the sharks who are full of the usual issues plaguing these films, from inappropriate activity, dimension changes, scale discrepancies, or being tasked with doing unnatural action scenes for the sake of getting the story going which all lower this one significantly.
Overview: **/5
A watchable enough if generally disappointing shark film, there are some positives to this one that manages to keep this one going enough although its series of flaws are generally quite damaging. Give it a shot mainly if you're a fan of these kinds of indie genre efforts, are hardcore cheesy shark film aficionados, or are fans of the creative crew while most others out there should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment