Main cast: Katrina Bowden (Kaz Fellows), Aaron Jakubenko (Charlie Brody), Tim Kano (Joji Minase), Kimie Tsukakoshi (Michelle Minase), and Te Kohe Tuhaka (Benny)
Director: Martin Wilson
I’m pretty fatigued over the week due to some real life annoyances, so when I come across Great White, hey, this looks like what I need. Shutting down my brain for a while and watching gleefully as sharks devour people—that sounds like a great way to relax.
The movie opens with a couple swimming in the Australian waters, and as usual, only the woman can spot that a shark may be coming. Well, she manages to get back onto her boat in time, only to see her man become snack for the snack. Then she gets hit in the head by a frayed rope snaps, sending the sail to spin around like a carousel, and falls into the water while I start to laugh out loud at the whole thing. Alas, the shark must be full by then, because it doesn’t show up to take a big chomp out of her.
Sadly, that is going to be only shark attack to tide me over as I’d be subjected to human folly for quite a long time after that.
Kaz Fellows and Charlie Brody are having a great life… well, it’d be great if they didn’t need money so badly. They operate a seaplane, but business is on the slow side. She’s a former nurse and he’s a former marine biologist, though, so I suppose it’s not too bad, as they can always fall back onto their old jobs if they had to sell off that seaplane.
Still, they perk up when a Japanese couple shows up to charter the seaplane in order to fly over the coral reef called, charmingly, Hell’s Reef. Michelle Minase wants to scatter her mother’s ashes over there, and the couple intend to have a jolly good time… until they all come across the body of the guy that gets chomped on in the opening scene.
They discover that somewhere out there is the yacht that carried the couple in opening scene here, and soon the clients and the owners of the seaplane argue about whether they should go look for the yacht and the dead guy’s girlfriend, who may still be alive and in need of rescue.
I know Joji is meant to be the asshole here, but they should have listened to him. Not only do they find the girlfriend dead (ugh, why didn’t they let me see the shark gnaw on her again?), the shark shows up to take a chomp out of the seaplane floater. Now five people—including Benny, the chef and assistant employed by Charlie and Kaz to help with the passengers—are stuck in an life raft while the shark thoughtfully waits in the sidelines as these idiots to bicker and hate on one another.
I don’t know why. I’d rather see the shark eat these people. What the hell is taking it so long?
That’s the biggest problem with Great White. The bulk of the movie is about these people stuck on a raft, arguing and fighting and doing very stupid things that put themselves in further danger.
Oh, there’s a shark out there waiting to eat them? Oh, Joji is jealous of Benny possibly making inroads in his wife’s affection, so let’s try to push Benny off the raft! Never mind that Benny is the capable, silent hunky type that could have MacGyver-ed them out of there, I guess Joji would rather be dead than irrationally jealous.
What, they have two oars? That’s one too many, let’s lose the extra one!
Sigh. Also, the two women are pregnant. Gee, how suspenseful! I wonder who will make it to the very end…
Devoid of thrills, instead packed with way too much annoying shrieking and shouting from obnoxious humans, Great White is more of a survival horror than shark attack party. Even then, it relies heavily on the idiot humans consecutively getting themselves into one act of imbecile realness after another, all in the name of generating tension or something. The problem with this approach is that the stupid people in such movies deserve what they get, and it’s hard not to instead root for them to all bite the big one fast.
I suppose Charlie and Kaz may not be as bad as Joji, but dashing off like that to rescue someone that may not even be alive, without contacting anyone first for backup or something, is arguably a too dumb to live move, especially when their seaplane is already falling apart due to a lack of proper maintenance as a result of patchy finances.
Anyway, who cares whether these dumb humans deserve to live or die. They are all one-dimensional archetypes, and the only one that is remotely interesting is Benny, the silent and capable hot type. Alas, he’s the token Australian minority character in this movie, and we all know what happens to such characters.
If only this thing had more shark attacks and fewer human behaving stupidly. The shark deserves better, as do I.
