Just when you thought it was safe to stream on Netflix...
The Story:
Kate (Halle Berry) is a "shark whisperer". Her method is to free swim outside of the cage to study shark behavior. Unfortunately, an accident claims the life of one of her friends, and her life is never the same. A year passes and a mysterious stranger shows up, offering a lot of money to get Kate back in the ocean and allow him to swim with the fishes.
Be careful what you wish for...
This is an interesting dilemma for me to have with a shark movie.
First, it's not a budget, cheesy poorly conceived shark attack movie from the SyFy Channel. There's actually some budget involved, the acting is decent and the underwater filming of the sharks in most instances is downright beautiful.
It was more of a drama than anything, and the shark attack sequences are almost added in as an afterthought. In fact there is one sequence which could have been removed altogether from the film to make it shorter, which at nearly 2 hours was in definite need of some trimming.
The shark attack(s) are infrequent. Not terrible CGI shark attacks either, which is nice.
Mostly the nice, cloudy red shark attacks where it's all implied, and nothing shown.
Tensions on the boat in the last act provide a lot of the dramatic tension, and then the movie sort of spins out of control as you have the character who has played it safe and by the rules the entire film making stupid decision after stupid decision, and the finale just makes the whole thing fall apart as you go "really, that's how it's going to end?"
In the end, again, it wasn't an unwatchable shark-fest of epic-ly bad proportions.
Instead it was a dramatic turn of events on the high seas that includes sharks to amp up the drama.
Not terrible, but I can't heartily recommend it.
Available to stream instantly on Netflix as of this writing.
Final Grade: C
Would I Own It: Nah.
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