After Jaws came
out in 1975 a laundry list of imitators followed; movies where people get eaten
by killer piranhas, barracudas, alligators, and, of course, more sharks. Nearly
all of these killer critter movies are trashy exploitation fare, but some of
them are trashy fun, while others are just trash. Shark Night 3D is certainly as trashy as its name implies, but it
could have stood to be a lot more fun. In my experience there are two different
approaches you can take to making shark movies fun to watch, you can either go full
on over the top with the kills and the exploitation, creating the filmic
equivalent of junk food, or you can milk the peril you put your characters in
of all potential suspense, create a real nail biter that keeps people on the
edge of their seats. Shark Night 3D doesn’t
go far enough in either direction and ends up being too bland to be a good time.
It’s not fair to compare a movie as obviously cheap and
throwaway as this to the king of the genre, Jaws,
but I’m going to anyways. Despite the fact that Jaws is mostly a film about a town and the people who live in it,
with horror elements that creep in, and Shark
Night 3D is a pretty straight horror movie that’s going for little other
than chills and gore, Jaws creates
scares so much better than this movie it’s kind of pathetic. Just compare the
opening scenes of each, where a young woman is alone out in the water and gets
taken by an unseen predator. One is moody and tense, with music that keeps us
alert and full of dread. The other seems more concerned with blood, screaming,
and blaring rock guitars. Jaws goes
for that nail biting strategy of making a shark movie work, and it nails it. Shark Night goes for the junk food
approach, but its PG-13 rating handcuffs it from showing us anything that could
effectively shock and appall in the way good junk does.
This is a lazy, paint by numbers horror film all the way
through. At no point is anything different or new offered to the audience. The
production of a feature film should start with an idea; or, at least, a new
twist on an old idea. If I had to guess, I would say that the only idea Shark Night 3D stemmed from is the idea
somebody had that they needed to churn out another 3D horror movie. It’s really
generic, and its most distinguishing feature is how little effort anybody put
into it on any level. If you’re going to make a slasher movie, you should at
least come up with some creative kills; Shark
Night 3D never puts it’s sharks to any creative use. In assembly line style
the kids are plucked out of the water and tore apart, to the point that shark
attacks start to feel mundane. The best trick the movie is able to come up with
is having the sharks jump out of the water, but they go to that well a few too
many times and end up ruining it.
The plot is simple enough that you could guess it. Sara
(Sara Paxton) is a small town girl who has a posh house on a lake in Louisiana.
On a break from college, she decides to bring a group of her new friends back
to the old hometown for a weekend of fun and frolicking. Things go awry though,
first when they run into some of Sara’s old chums (Chris Carmack and Joshua
Leonard) who are straight up hillbillies and don’t take too kindly to college
folk, and then when their water play gets interrupted by vicious, bloody shark
attacks. The town Sherriff (Donal Logue) is a drunk and kind of a dope, Sara’s
old buddies seem to think that college kids getting terrorized is more funny
than anything else, and there is more than a little evidence that these sharks
were placed in the lake and are being manipulated to kill deliberately; so the
kids are left hung out to dry on their own. Their cell phones don’t work out on
the lake after all; this is that kind of horror movie. Panic and slaughter
ensues.
The acting here isn’t great, especially from the females.
Paxton is stunningly pretty, but more than a blank slate when she’s asked to
read lines or emote. Perhaps she should look into modeling. Katharine McPhee
plays one of Sara’s female friends, and I would recommend that she stick to
singing and just forget about branching out into movies. Dustin Mulligan plays
the underdog quiet kid who has a crush on Sara, Sinqua Walls plays the big
campus sports star, and Joel David Moore plays the standard skinny, snarky dude.
They fare better than the females, but never get much of a chance to do
anything other than slip into now standard roles. Mulligan and Walls work well
when they get the chance to play action hero, but precious little of this
film’s runtime is spent exploring that. Really, the only fun performances come
from Logue, Carmack, and Leonard, who get to ham it up as the local color. It
seems like they were the only ones told that they were in a bad movie and they
should have some fun with it. Logue, especially, does well when delivering a monologue
about modern popular culture, the only two minutes of the film that actually
felt like they contained ideas. I would have much rather watched things unfold
from his perspective.
The biggest problem I had was that the story takes too long
getting out of the starting gate. We spend a lot of time meeting the kids,
establishing who they are in their college lives, watching them travel out to
the lake, and then hang out and have fun, all before the killings begin. It
felt like I had accidentally watched a half hour of MTV before the real movie
started. Seeing as all of the characters are well-established archetypes that
never go anywhere unexpected, all of the time spent setting things up was
wasted. It could have taken 5 minutes to get the kids out in the water and
ready to be chewed up, but instead it took the whole first act. Even though the
shark kills aren’t grizzly or over the top enough to impress, there is still
some inherent joy to be had in even the most mundane horror movie kill scene,
so perhaps I would have responded better to the shark shenanigans if I wasn’t
already bored by the time they started happening.
Defenders of this film will say that it’s just a stupid
shark movie and to sit back and enjoy it, but it’s not stupidity that bothers
me, it’s laziness. And it’s the cowardly decision that studios keep making to
try and fit horror and action movies, movies that more often than not need more
explicit material to be engaging, into a PG-13 mold that can sell tickets to
teenagers. People spend more time underwater without air than physically
possible in this movie, that’s not the sort of thing that bothers me. When,
after a shark attacks and blows up a speedboat, a character’s big new plan is
to ask how fast the wave runner is, I don’t do much more than smirk. I can take
dumb. But I can’t take lazy. When none of your characters have any unique or
memorable traits, when there is no ingenuity to the big action set pieces, and
when your story is structured so typically that a child could predict exactly
what happens next, you’ve churned out a movie that exists for no reason. We
have plenty of horror movies, we have plenty of shark movies; what does your
film have to offer that makes it stand out? Last year Piranha 3D answered that question by offering up tons of boobs and
blood and innovative violence. Jaws started
the whole genre off by offering so many horror movie chills that some people
still won’t swim in the ocean because of it. Shark Night 3D just shrugs its shoulders and tells you that you
need to cough up a couple more bucks for the 3D glasses.
