Main cast: Tania Raymonde (Dr Emma Collins), Nathaniel Buzolic (Richard Lowell), Emerson Brooks (Eugene Shaw), Bren Foster (Lucas), Reina Aoi (Miya), Alex Bhat (Spinnaker), Siya Mayola (Bahari), Avumile Qongqo (Nandi), Brashaad Mayweather (Brown), Ernest St Clair (Schill), and DeVille Vannik (Earls)
Director: John Pogue
Oh god, as if the previous installment weren’t bad enough… who asked for this, anyway? I suppose they need to fill up the slots in all those streaming services somehow, so any cheaply made movie will do. On the bright side, this one didn’t involve Syfy at all, unlike the previous movie, and hence, it didn’t have to make do with Syfy’s notorious low-budget limitations during its genesis. Mind you, this is never going to be mistaken for a tent pole offering, as it is still visibly and noticeably a low budget flick, but it also boasts better production values. The CGI this time around is nowhere as awful as that in the previous entry.
The plot will be familiar to folks that have seen enough of this kind of movie. We have an American scientist, Dr Emma Collins, who comes down to some coastal third-world village to virtue signal and ask for donation. The money won’t go to the displaced folks of this village, of course. She will use it to fund her scuba-diving excursions as she tries to discover the effects of global warming on the population of the great white sharks in the area. Oh, that is one research that will advance humanity to the next level—who cares about the folks that no longer have their wooden homes and fishing boats, this American bitch is going to get my money because she looks like a model and she virtue signals on social media!
Emma’s research is of course manned by various people of, shall we say, ethnic origin, because progressiveness and inclusiveness, Hollywood-style, is always about white or white-passing people being the boss and giving orders to the people of color that they claim to champion. Emma’s joyous reign as the American savior of the ignorant and hapless oppressed sharks and little people is interrupted when her ex, Richard Lowell, shows up with his own team. Richard claims that he is here to look for three bull sharks, but oh ho, we all know there is something extra about those sharks. That’s right, as per the previous movies in this franchise, these are smart sharks who don’t want to be captured by these human cretins!
You know, I think these sharks are smarter than the human beings of color in this movie, because those characters are clearly more capable than the American idiots in charge, Emma and Richard, but they are content to simply take instructions, do all the menial work, cover the rear ends of their incompetent bosses, and for some of them that are of a certain sex that does not enjoy plot armor in a politically correct Hollywood these days, die to the sharks while going all out for these incompetent bosses.
Unfortunately, I am hard-pressed to call Deep Blue Sea 3 a shark movie. Sure, the sharks show up now and then, but the bulk of the movie revolves around this patronizing and often hypocritical portrayal of Americans as saviors of the people and the environment of a third world country, which of course sees these Americans bickering, fighting, and shrieking at one another; ultimately blowing up what remains of the already decimated village. This is the kind of nonsense parodied in Team America: World Police, and it’s played out here without any hint of self awareness.
Look, I like inclusiveness and diversity in movies, alright, but come on, please do it properly. I always cringe when all these Hollywood lefties act like they are such great, noble people to cast people of color in movies and TV shows, but in ways that actually reveal just how little these lefties actually think of people of color as individuals. If anything, characters of color more often than not are the mules that do all the heavy lifting for the white or white-passing characters, when they are not accessories to make these white characters look like better people.
Anyway, back to this movie. It’s a shame that so much of this movie revolves around the boring humans because they are all barely more than one-note stereotypes. The actress playing Emma seems to have great difficulties making her character resemble a human being instead of, say, a robot. The bikini she wears has more personality than her entire character. The blokes… who cares, they may do most of the work here, but male characters are officially haram in Hollywood, so they can all die. Meanwhile, no matter how passive and incompetent the female characters may be, they all survive because we all know huge, hungry man-eating sharks are no match for the power of identifying as female in today’s climate.
Okay, of all the female characters here, Emma does something now and then, like wearing a bikini and then shrieking for the men to help distract the sharks off her so that she can fasten some bombs to some silly thing. Still, Emma is such a poorly written character, who cares about her. She comes off as outsmarted by the male characters here most of the time, and the villain (male, of course) has to uncharacteristically become stupid towards the end so that our heroine can have a win handed to her by the script. Seriously, when I look at the closing scene with the survivors, these survivors’ “victories” feel so unearned and hence unsatisfying because okay, aside from Emma, what do these people do again to earn the right to be the last people standing?
Meanwhile, the sharks show up once in a while, often when the good guys are in a fix, so that these sharks can eat the bad guys and have an unearned win handed to the good guys. That or the soon-to-be victim will say some clichéd stuff about how things will be okay and… yawn, the shark suddenly flies up from the water, eats them, and then will never be seen again until the script needs another diversion from the boring human drama. Why is this, why are the sharks so sidelined in a movie called Deep Blue Sea 3? Is it because the person doing the CGI charges by the hour and they can’t make the person work too long or there’d be no money left for the catering?
At the end of the day, this one is more of a badly-written, amateurish movie made from a script that seemed to be written by consensus by the lesser intelligent denizens of the progressive side of Twitter, with sharks showing up now and then to kill various characters to justify its status as a shark movie. Sure, it’s better than the previous installment, but come on, practically anything is better than that waste of time.
You know what? Forget this movie. Go watch Jaws. It turns 45 this year, and it is still what every shark movie should aspire to be.
