Shark Frenzy

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to The Spac Hole, another Shark Movie review leaps from the depths and chomps off the final sinewy threads your sanity. Happy Monday!

Shark Frenzy (also known as Shark Waters, because all shark movies must have two names) is another film with daddy issues – including this one and the last two I’ve reviewed, this has been a common theme. A young woman is going on an ocean fishing trip as it’s something she used to love doing with her dad as a kid – dad’s not dead, he just can’t be arsed coming this time. Joining her on the yacht are a couple of newly weds, or soon to be weds (and also soon to be deads), the Captain, and his sideman. Unfortunately, a spate of shark attacks has just been announced as the boat sets off and they miss the communication. Or they ignore it – doesn’t matter. As typically happens with these things, the gang is attacked by sharks, the boat is stranded, and phones and radios end up in the drink. The battle for survival is on.

As well as the general position our walking Hor d’oevres find themselves in, the sharks seem to be immensely powerful. At multiple points in the film, a single shark is capable of ramming the boat and knocking one of our victims twirling into the sky and into the water as if they’ve just stepped on a landmine in an 80s action movie. Luckily, this isn’t as catastrophic an issue as you may think because the sharks also seem to be made of jelly. A single strike on the head with a broken oar is usually enough destroy them, in bloody fashion. So, we have sharks rocking a boat similarly sized to the Orca from Jaws with enough force to throw a fully grown human 20 metres off to the side, but weak enough that the same puny human could crush its skull with a slap, like Jax from Mortal Kombat. More blood and laughs for me, in any case.

Keeping on the plus side, the film looks decent and the performances aren’t terrible. The daddy rescue is fairly amusing with daddy somehow managing to find the fishing boat before the coast guard by travelling in a one-person dinghy. Yes, like one of those ones you buy on your holiday to Majorca so the kids can float about in the pool. I genuinely don’t understand the thought process behind this, either by the character (a former grizzled survivalist type fisherman) or the writers (why not an actual boat). Was there some bit about boats being blocked from going to sea because of the attacks? Possibly. How he hoped to get there, and rescue whatever was left of the survivors in such a small vessel is a complete mystery. Still, it adds to the insanity of it all.

I think I’m done with cheap shark movies for 2023. There’s a few I haven’t been able to catch yet, and a few which look too terrible even for me to endure, but no doubt there’ll be another batch for me to sit through by the time next year rolls around. Let us know in the comments what you think of Shark Frenzy!

Shark Attack!

If you read and enjoyed my recent review of the shark movie Swim, or if you indeed, somehow watched and enjoyed that movie, then you’re in for a treat as today we’re talking about another shark movie which is somehow worse. Maybe it’s not worse, but it’s at least as bad. It’s a shame, because the trailer made it look as if it might be a cheaper, less interesting version of The Shallows. It ain’t.

The movie, in grand tradition, starts with a scene of a bikini-clad being gobbled up by a shark. It has little bearing on the plot and exists purely for some early titillation and gore, and to tell us that this is a movie about sharks attacking, in case that wasn’t clear from the movie’s name.

We switch to our central trio – a model, her photographer ex-boyfriend, and his current make-up professional girlfriend. The three are in Florida, heading out to some island to do a photoshoot. Oh look! Michael Madsen is also here, and WTF is going on with his eyes? Like Joey Lawrence in Swim, who was clearly there for two days of filming, Madsen was seemingly called in his own house, on the day, with no forewarning, and told to literally read some dialogue off the email he was just sent. Holy God, the line reading in this movie is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. More on that later.

The island our trio are heading out to is apparently only reachable by canoe, but they decide to go to an even more remote island which is rapidly going under the water due to tides. Foolishly, they are ill-prepared for unfortunate circumstances such as tide-rising and shark-gobbling, neglecting to fully charge their phones or bring walkie-talkies, food, flares, or common sense. Damn millennials, eh? Shortly after arriving at their destination, old Sharky McRipleg shows up with white pubescent flesh on his mind. The water’s rising, the shark is circling, and nobody knows they’re out there.

Luckily, Michael Madsen is here! He’s daddy to one of the trio, a former pilot and all round hero. He’s not your typical hero; he doesn’t resort to such tropes as leaping into action, fashioning a makeshift Bell 222 from old bits and bobs in his garage before hightailing it down to Florida to offer a bullet-hell solution on some protected wildlife, nor does he organize a zany crew of old friends to head out on one last ‘this is suicide’ mission to save his family. No no, instead he elects to sit in his cozee chair, struggle to read explanations of meteorology and co-ordinates to some guy on the phone, take off his glasses, put them back, and occasionally rub his head all the while looking coked off his tits and giving a million mile stare off in the corner where I can only assume the Producers were holding his actual family at gunpoint, yelling ‘just read the damn lines or the puppy gets it’. He does get to mumble things like ‘you’ve been through hell, now you have to go through high water’, which is both terrible and worse than terrible.

This would all be fine if there was some threat and comedy in the movie, but elsewhere it’s just poorly made. Incompetent editing and directing which a simple once-over by another pair of eyes should have been enough to resolve; shots of the island going under the waves, then in the next shot not being touched by water at all, scenes of our survivors supposedly out to sea and struggling to swim yet the camera clearly showing the ground within touching distance of their feet, followed by scenes shot metres below the waves showing their feet way above, and repeated shot after recycled repeated shot of canoes. Our survivors have this good cop bad cop thing going on, with one going above and beyond on the freak out scale, while the other is unreasonably calm. This wouldn’t be so odd if it stayed consistent, but the two switch roles at multiple times, with both trading what I would normally call uncharacteristic sarcastic barbs if either had a character to speak of.

It’s not all bad. We watch these movies not expecting them to be good, or even particularly well made, but because we want to see idiots killed in amusing ways. There’s a bit of that, the ocean shots look nice, the effects aren’t terrible, and outside of whatever is going on with Madsen the performances aren’t the worst. As a Neighbours fan I did enjoy getting to see the same guy who played the villainous Gareth Bateman getting chomped up. On the sliding scale of bad shark movies, this is somewhere in the middle, neither offering the nonsense nor the entertaining silliness of the worst of the bunch. It’s worth watching for Michael Madsen’s new interpretation of the art of acting alone.

Let us know in the comments what you think of Shark Attack!

 

Swim

With Meg 2 lighting up the box office and pissing off critics upset that a movie about a giant prehistoric shark isn’t a Wes Anderson quirk-fest, it’s about time I once again scrape the bottom of the ocean floor in search of the best of bad shark movies. Enter Swim.

Swim follows a similar format to Alexander Aja’s thoroughly enjoyable Crawl and the entertaining and little seen Burning Bright. Each film is a mixture of home invasion and animal attack, and while Burning Bright featured the leading light of Brianna Evigan and the novelty of a unique premise versus Aja’s nuanced experience of bringing quality to somewhat tacky ideas, Swim is on the lower end of what you can expect from a film about being trapped in a house with a big beastie.

A family (who never once feel like a real family) are heading to their summer vacation rental. Dismissing the advice of the weathermen and the huge, dark clouds on the horizon and ignoring the obvious shenanigans of their previously-proven-to-be-shady landlord, the barrel their way down the coast in search of one last get together before their eldest heads off to college. Daddy (Joey Lawrence) was only contracted to be on set for two days, so he spends the majority of the film away from the others, yelling into a phone in his car, before an ill-advised and illogical rescue attempt. As the storm gets more fierce and the waves rise (to levels which would surely cause irreversible damage to the entire State), an excessively hungry shark decides that the family is in need of downsizing, so heads on inside and starts chomping.

Swim is the sort of movie which the tired criticism of ‘predictable’ was made for. Not only did I, within the opening two minutes, correctly predict who would be eaten, but in which order and under what specific circumstances. Aside for some late canon fodder additions, my predictions came true and I began to wonder if I was in fact watching a movie that other people had written and directed, or if there was some psychic connection between me and some God Tier AI which was able to instantly convert my thoughts into what was happening on screen.

Thankfully, the shark effects aren’t too awful. They’re not great, but in most cases we just see a brief fin cutting through the waves. Beyond the insane logic of the shark coming into the house, then up the stairs, then up the other stairs while still somehow being hungry after its first taste of idiot flesh, it doesn’t go sailing through the air or perform death defying feats of anti-biology. There isn’t much acting on display – Joey Lawrence shouts for a bit, poor old Andy Lauer looks like he has zero awareness of what a movie even is, and Jennifer Field as the mum is very adapt at making an ‘O’ shape with her mouth. There’s never a sense of threat and the only enjoyment comes from seeing what the next silly decision will be or whether or not I’ll pass out Rum by the time dad finally makes it to the house. The kills do keep coming relatively thick and fast through the movie, and that’s really why we come to watch, right?

You know what to expect from a movie like this, and it delivers. It’s not good, and it’s not on the level of ridiculousness as the Sharknado series, but it will help you enjoy your Rum buzz. Let us know what you think of Swim in the comments!

Frenzy (2018)

Another day, another low budget shark movie. Hey, at least this one tries to be serious, at least this one doesn’t simply slap two scary or amusing things together and get the local drunk to write the script. “Hey Bruce, I have a pitch for ya – ‘SpiderShark’ – has anyone made that yet? Or wait, ‘WereShark – it only comes out when the full moon is high’ – we could probably put together a script for those in a weekend, with names like those they write themselves!” These are precisely the sorts of conversations which go on in Production meetings – I should know, I’m an idiot.

So yes, Frenzy tries to be serious, but in doing so it makes many, many of the things which happen seem all the more ridiculous. Why do the plane’s wing spontaneously drop off? Why doesn’t the dude just gently land the plane when he was gliding about 50 foot above the very calm water? Why do the sharks travel in a pack of three? Why do they attack like that? Why do they look like that? Why can’t the shark rip the dinghy to shreds in two seconds but yet easily knocks two idiots out of a large boat? Why do the two idiots suddenly abort their rescue attempt to attack the sharks? Why did the sister jump in the water when the other sister was probably safe? How the hell did the sister do that counting backwards stunt when the shark was heading straight for her and how did the shark not simply adjust itself and get her anyway? How the hell did that boulder trick work? Why didn’t the shark simply swim further under water away from the fire? Why didn’t they cut the rope from the wooden raft and paddle over to the boat? Why can’t they use a radio? Why don’t they try to climb onto the mushroom shaped island? Why didn’t they throw the ‘distraction rocks’ further than three foot from the raft? Why am I watching this?

To summarize as briefly as possible, a group of friends travel the world making vlogs about the exotic places they visit, and they’re exactly the sort of people you wouldn’t want as friends – always smiley, happy, and gawping about how amazing their lives are. But look – is there… is there something going on between the sister’s boyfriend and the other sister? Ooh, intriguing. No wait, that’s not what I meant – I meant oooh, we haven’t seen that device before, and oooh it’s completely irrelevant anyway and goes absolute nowhere. They are travelling to an off the beaten track excuse for an island – more like a tumor slumped in the middle of the ocean. You can guess what happens next.

The main character is played by Aubrey Reynolds, who looks like someone I can’t quite place. It’s annoying. She does as well as she possibly can. Her, and everyone else in the cast I don’t recognise from anything else and based on the performances here I don’t think that will change in the future. In fairness, they aren’t given a lot to work with. It’s weird how so many films get the ‘I’m trapped in water and surrounded by sharks’ idea so wrong. I can’t be that hard to do it, right? Still, it’s a movie to half-watch with friends, only paying attention when something stupid happens or when the sharks arrive. In the pantheon of shark movies, it’s not the worst but it languishes with all the hundreds of others in the murky depths of mediocrity.

Let me know what you think of Frenzy in the comments!

Bait

Why do we do it? Or more specifically, why do I do it? You can count the number of good, truly good shark movies on one hand and yet I watch as many of the bad ones as I can, knowing full well they are going to be bad. Is it my inherent love for the mysterious creatures? Is it because most shark movies are horror movies and an excuse to watch annoying people get chomped to pieces? Is it the hope that maybe one day someone will make another truly good one? I think it’s all of those things – I’ve always loved sharks and horror movies, and I always hope that another good one will appear. Reading the synopsis of shark movies, and knowing the companies and money involved before hand is a valid way of anticipating if the film will be good, but as I’ve said, that won’t put me off; it may not be good, but it could still be entertaining.

Bait has the following synopsis:

‘A freak tsunami traps a group of people in a submerged grocery store. As they try to escape, they are hunted by white sharks that are hungry for meat’

Aren’t most tsunamis freak events? Also, that kind of makes it sound as if the grocery store was already submerged. I assume they mean Great White Sharks too, and the fact that they’re hungry for meat goes without saying. If I was trapped in a grocery store, you’d better believe I’d be looting it to the bone. And I wouldn’t be starting with the meat, no, I’d be filling my face with sweets and crisps first – all that top shelf stuff (matron). Plus, that synopsis makes me think of two other movies I’d like to see – one set in a world where all shops are underwater, like The Jetsons but with water instead of space. So.. Spongebob, I guess. Secondly, a movie about a freakshow tsunami – a giant supafly wave which does funky dances and wears an afro.

All in all, I don’t mind the idea for this – it has potential, merging survival horror with loose disaster movie and siege movie tropes. I imagine John Carpenter having a go at this – it’s basically Assault On Precinct 13 but with sharks instead of gangstas and crap instead of goodness. Honestly, it’s not all that bad. In terms of being a cheap B movie, it’s perfectly watchable and gives enough attention to its characters that we have a passing interest in their fates, if not care. The acting is a notch above what you would expect from these things, with famous faces like Sharni Vinson and Julian McMahon providing the ‘oh, I know that guy’ moments. The film also spends time building up to the main scenario, introducing various characters and conflicts before releasing the sharks. It begins with a tragic event as lifeguard Josh watches his friend Rory be killed by a shark during a rescue. Rory was brother to Tina, Tina was engaged to Josh. Flashforward a year and Josh and Tina have split up, with Josh now working in a supermarket. Tina shows up with her new boyfriend – uh oh. Worse, a couple of criminals show up too in a botched armed robbery – oh no. Worse still, a tsunami drops, trapping the staff, shoppers, and criminals together – oopsy. Then to spice things up further, some sharks have been washed in by the tsunami, and I have a feeling they like the taste of young pretty flesh.

At times it feels like there are too many characters, each with their own crap. There are security guards, criminals, managers, shoplifters, couples galore, dogs, and some are revealed to be intertwined and some are revealed to be dicks. There are a couple of ‘twists’ though I pissed off my wife by calling them out long before they were revealed, as I always do. I won’t spoil them here, but they seemed fairly obvious even to me. There was a great moment where it looked like the dog was killed, only for a later cop-out. Hey, I love dogs but I love it just as much when people who moan about dogs being killed in movies (which almost never happens) are frightened that the dogs will be hurt. The dog here especially is more than deserving of being gobbled. But as mentioned, there is a lot going on, characters trying to resolve their differences all while working together (or not) to try to survive and escape. Certain characters are split off from the main group, some have selfish motives, others are fish fodder.

The gore and kills are as you would expect – a lot of improbable shark action and even more improbable attempts to hunt and kill the sharks. The CG isn’t great but it’s still a level or twelve above Sharknado – you’ll get a laugh out of it but can still suspend your disbelieve enough to not let it get in the way of the story. The film is actually known as Bait 3D – so you know you’re going to get some of those scenes to make the 3D stand out. Naturally I watched in 2D, so these scenes added to the ridicule. In terms of pacing and action, the film rattles along nicely and while it hits all of the expected notes, it does so in a fun way. I was never bored even though I’ve seen it all before. It’s much better than the ‘so bad it’s good’ shark movies, but still a way behind Jaws and… Jaws 2. Thanks to an interesting premise, a decent cast of recognizable faces, and actual attention to building story and character (somewhat), Bait is a film for anyone who enjoys shark movies or animal attack movies in general.

Let us know in the comments what you thought of Bait!

Dark Tide

Well. Well, that was a piece of shit, wasn’t it? I’m not usually interested in criticizing a film when it’s bad or ripping it to shreds for comedy purposes, but when I’ve already stated that I watch a lot of bad, deliberately bad shark movies, and a lot of low budget, made for TV shark movies with the worst CG this side of me and Microsoft Paint, to say this is worse than those should be everything you need to know.

Halle Berry stars as Kate, a shark whisperer who likes to free dive with Great Whites. Fair enough. I don’t think she’s necessarily miscast and I usually like her, but she has no business being in this film beyond being as a vanity project for her and her husband and co-star Olivier Martinez. Note – I had no idea they were married or together or anything until my wife told me. Note – Olivier Martinez has never been good in anything. Ever. Some other people are in it – doesn’t matter. They are married in the movie and are making self-involved ‘movies’ about swimming with sharks, which involves jumping into the ocean and tugging on their fins. I… I sense something might be about to go wrong. Yes, Quarrel is gobbled by a shark and we flash-forward 12 months to see that Kate is… continuing like nothing ever happened. She doesn’t make the movies anymore and she doesn’t see her husband, but she’s still out on the water, now giving tours which isn’t bringing in much money. Her husband appears on the scene again with an offer to take some billionaire out on a special tour so he can swim with the sharks like she used to. I… I sense something might be about to go wrong…

This movie cost $25 million. Here are some things which could have been done with $25 million instead of making this movie:

Donate to Shark Preservation charities

Donate to me

Go to Space with you and all your friends

Buy your own island (and shoot your own shitty movies there)

Hire a hundred teachers

Buy 25 MRI machines

But 10 CAT machines

Give a hell of a lot of starving people a hell of a lot of food and water

Give a hell of a lot of homeless people a hell of a lot of shelter

I don’t know… a bunch of monkeys to play with.

Yet they decided to go ahead and make Dark Tide. I honestly have no idea why or how this was released in its current state. Filmed in 2010 it flapped around until a limited release in 2012 – clearly no-one (rightly) had any clue what to do with it and decided just to chuck it out there and maybe get a few bucks back on their investment. It is a completely incoherent mess. Halle Berry’s character, we assume is supposed to be traumatized by the death of her friend, yet spends the whole movie smiling and joking like she’s parading down a red carpet. She has spent a year away from swimming with sharks, but dives on in with zero hesitation or post traumatic stress. The wife of the guy who was killed at the start – far from blaming the sheer stupidity of her husband and Berry’s character, she just shrugs it off like ‘meh, he lived his life like he wanted – being eaten’. Berry is meant to be estranged from her husband, has removed his number from her phone, and hasn’t seen him in a year, yet spends the entire film flirting with and fondling him like they’re horny teens on their first date; even though he’s a complete dick the entire time. Later she finally comes to her senses and decides that no, they’re not going to take their clearly falling to pieces ship into the most shark invested part of the world and let some asshole swim outside a cage with sharks, only for the husband to slap her around about, to which SHE apologizes for, and then goes ahead and takes them to dive with the sharks.

Oh, we’re not finished folks. There’s a scene – a completely irrelevant scene early in the movie which… I have not idea why it exists. It sets up a bunch of shady characters who seem to be going poaching? They’re in a dodgy van, they go to a stretch of water, then go diving for oysters, or abalone, or doubloons or something. Right, so these are bad guys and they’re going to show up later and attack Berry’s boat or Berry will have to save them from being eaten. Nope, we see them swim around the water for a minute and then… nothing? They are never seen again, there is no mention of them again, they aren’t attacked? No idea. The dead guy’s wife is apparently psychic, calling the coastguard to tell them that she ‘knows something has gone wrong’ on Berry’s boat and to get a search party out there. It’s okay, she isn’t seen again either. There’s a 10 minute stretch where Berry takes a random family out on a trip – so these guys are going to get attacked and eaten? Nope, she just takes them out, comes back, and then takes out the next group who do get attacked. It’s almost like they filmed the first family and decided they weren’t interesting enough to spend the rest of the film with, but we’ve filmed the scenes so we may as well keep them in the movie.

Oh yeah, the boat keeps breaking – in the character’s own words beyond repair – then is suddenly fixed and working in the next scene. This happens more than once. Every character without fail has zero motivation for anything that happens or anything they do, everybody apparently hates everyone else yet spend most of their time joking and giggling. Berry’s character can hold her breath… forever? She’s down in that water as day turns to night, comes up for a quick puff, and then heads down again for a few hours. There’s a storm coming and their boat is already broken but why the hell shouldn’t they keep going for an hour and a half into the storm and further from shore to get to the sharks. Hell, it’s not like they could go home and come back the next day. They go out to an area which has literally hundreds of seals swimming around after telling us that sharks can’t resists seals. Then they get on the boat and say there are no sharks around so they tie a carboard seal to the back of the boat, drive forward a few yards, and lo and behold a shark attacks the fake seal? Eh? Why would it go for thi, and not one of the other thousand or so real seals around it? But wait – actually, it was a real seal the shark attacked because they put the cardboard on back on the boat, intact. So the fake one is used to attract sharks in an area full of real seals and make them attack the real ones? But wait – the footage of the shark attacking the seal is actually a fairly famous real-life clip of a shark attack that they edited into the movie. Believe me, I’m only scratching the surface here? Not a single moment passes in this movie without something entirely implausible, nonsensical, ridiculous, or pointless happening, completely without explanation.

As I said, it’s not like me to go harping on about a film’s shortcomings as I know how much effort and collaboration, and work goes into making a film to the extent that it’s almost a miracle anything ever gets made. But seriously, how did this ever see the light of day? Director John Stockwell seems to have a fetish for bikini clad women or deep blue seas, having also unleashed Blue Crush, Into The Blue, and the as yet to be imagined Blue Smurfs Have A Blue Old Time Playing The Blues In Blue Blue Sea (Part Blue). The film has a couple of things going for it – good underwater photography in places, and the use of actual sharks. Why bother choosing this over something on the Discovery Channel then? For the chumps being chomped of course, but unfortunately we only get that once in the opening five minutes, and briefly in the final ten. Everything else in between is completely bewildering. Anyway, I’ve watched quite a few shark movies recently but this is the first I just had to write about and publish immediately (having watched it last night). More shark movie reviews to come, and as not great as those movies were, I’d easily recommend those over this.

Let us know in the comments what you thought of Dark Tide, especially if you’re one of those weirdos who actually enjoyed it.

USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage

This should have been called USS Indianapolis: Men Of Cloneage, amirite! Coz they all look the same! Seriously, some of the flaws of this movie could have been avoided if they had simply cast some actors with more distinct faces. Throughout the movie I couldn’t tell who was who, which one wanted to marry the blonde, which one was the thief, which one just got eaten etc. In all seriousness, this is a powerful story, one of my favourite true stories of all time actually, and it deserves to be told well. Unfortunately this film doesn’t deliver – its low budget is very noticeable and negative, the performances are forgettable, and too much of the movie is spent attempting to introduce the characters so that we are invested and affected by what comes later – though these early scenes are horribly and confusingly edited in such a way that it simply becomes frustrating and we lose interest. I found myself sadly thinking, just get to the sharks already.

A bit of a personal backstory. When I was young, one of my favourite books was Maneaters by Rupert Matthews. It’s a collection of true stories based on horrific encounters between people and animals – bear and tiger attacks, snakes, sharks etc. One of the stories was about the USS Indianapolis, and that story makes up the bulk of this film. In 1945, the US Military has crafted a couple of atomic bombs and would like nothing more than to drop them on Japan. The A-Team were several decades away, so they decided to send some of the bomb parts via battleship to The Philippines – a mission so secret only the top brass knew about it. The unlucky ship going on this mission was the ship of the title, knowingly being sent into enemy territory without an escort to defend them from submarine attacks which they could not foresee or withstand. They successfully completed their mission, but on the return journey the Indianapolis was spotted by a Japanese sub who torpedoed the hell out of it. Within minutes the ship was in the water. I can’t recall the numbers, but there were over 1100 men on board, and around 900 went into the water. Stranded, cold, and bleeding, with barely any life rafts and thousands of miles of ocean all around them, things were looking bleak. And then the sharks came. And came. And came.

If you don’t think you know the story, you’ve probably heard it famously delivered by Quint in Jaws, thanks to John Milius, Robert Shaw, and Howard Sackler. Yes, Quint tells Brody and Hooper about where one of his scars came from – after he went into the ocean when the Japanese struck. It’s one of the most famous moments in Jaws, chillingly delivered. One of the first stories I ever wrote featured a character haunted by his involvement and memories of the event. I saw Mission Of The Shark when I was young – a TV movie starring Richard Thomas and Stacey Keach, also based on the event and it was then that I learned about the court case aftermath and the dubious plots. Maneaters you see, only focused on the immediate human event – one man’s recollections of what is was like to be trapped, surrounded, and feeling hope ebb away. It’s then that I thought ‘why doesn’t someone famous and powerful actually make a good movie about this?’ When I first heard about Men Of Courage I hoped that movie had finally come, but as reports about the movie, then previews, then reviews came, my hope ebbed too.

The second half of the film is considerably stronger than the first. I was worried it was going to go downhill due to horrible shark effects, but in most cases the sharks are very good. Am I right in saying some were real too? There were some moments which appeared to be ridiculous and not how sharks would actually behave, but on the whole it was fine. The problem is that this section of the movie felt too short. It was low on tension, there wasn’t much emotion, and by that point I didn’t care about most of the characters or differentiate between them. The movie is basically in three large parts, or five smaller chapters – Meeting the team, the mission, the sharks, the court case, the end. I appreciate the attempts to introduce the characters, but as mentioned it simply doesn’t work. Cage’s Captain is really the only character we care for as he is the focal point throughout the five chapters. Cage’s performance is either restrained or flat – it essentially could have been anyone. I appreciate that when making a film like this, you can’t possibly focus on everyone, but you can give us a subset of characters and get us emotionally invested from the outset – make them likable, or real at the very least. Make them stand out, with their own lives, past, fears, and flaws. I’m repeating myself, but the film tries and fails.

To its credit, the film does also show things from the opposing side. We meet several of the Japanese crew and see them as humans forced into a position no-one would ever want to be in. The film neither shies away from pointing the finger of blame squarely at those who actually were to blame. Even though the film essentially ends on a downer, we get some real life footage of the rescue and brief moments from the remaining survivors and other archive footage to re-iterate the courage of those involved. A little over 300 men survived the ordeal.

There was one fantastic moment late in the shark section where the music swells and the camera swings around some of the survivors in long shots to give an eagle eye view of the vastness of their struggle – we see some in rafts, some dead and floating away, some exhausted and gripping on to what they can, and some simply drifting among the ever present shark fins, past caring that they could be the next to succumb. That’s what I want to see – the real struggle, the real pain, and by virtue of surviving, the real courage.

Let us know in the comments what you thought of USS Indianapolis: Men Of Courage. Did you enjoy it more than you expected to, or was it another poor attempt at telling a tragic tale?