Worth: $4.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Josh Lucas, Fernanda Urrejola, Venus Ariel, Carlos Solórzano
Intro:
… less The Meg and more Greenpeace environmental awareness campaign on crack.
What starts out as a picture-perfect holiday for Paul Sturges (Josh Lucas) and his family, ends in disaster when they find themselves stranded in an unwelcoming beachside town being terrorised by a not-so-extinct, ruthlessly savage megalodon.
An uneven family drama with occasional pretence towards action, the film’s sparing use of the titular antagonist is perhaps an attempt at capturing the audience’s imagination and building suspense, but the lack of pacing or coherency defuses any tension that the occasional flashes of fin might generate. There’s more menace radiating from the gang of hostile townsfolk making untoward advances at Sturges’ teenage daughter than anything the so-called Demon gets up to in the first 40 minutes of the film. Unsure if he’s trying to recreate Deep Blue Sea or Deliverance, screenwriter Boise Esquerra delivers clumsy one-liners (“Corporate’s not gonna like this!”) alongside equally ham-fisted political messages, sandwiched between all-too-frequent family histrionics.
Given director Adrian Grunberg’s (Get the Gringo, Rambo: Last Blood) roots in the Rambo franchise, it’s not too far-fetched to have hoped he might have learned to lean into the B-grade camp of a story like this, but instead, we’re treated to a fishbowl-lensed fever dream, less The Meg and more Greenpeace environmental awareness campaign on crack.
While the central message of the film has its heart in the right place — don’t mess with the ocean lest the ocean mess with you — the heavy-handed execution proves harder to digest than the many hundred poorly CGId body parts littering The Black Demon’s ocean lair. Still, champion of the environment or not, it’s fair to say that after spending the movie becoming acquainted with the Sturges family and the nightmarish residents of “El Diamante”, we’re all rooting for the shark.
