Shark Night 3D – 1 Bucket
January 3, 2012 by Danny Baldwin
Late in the second act of Shark Night 3D, after about half of our college-aged protagonists have been chomped to pieces by their aquatic aggressors, there comes the inevitable mention of Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week”. An antagonist (a human, not a shark) crazily meditates on the fact that everybody loves the flesh-hungry monsters of the sea, making the program cable TV’s most popular. Something tells me that his dialogue was taken straight from the Hollywood boardroom where Shark Night 3D was green-lit, because the movie’s success was clearly predicated on the logic that if there are sharks, people will come.
Aside from the presence of said sharks (and many species, at that), this is your average PG-13 horror misfire. Yes, that’s right — Shark Night 3D is a movie about attractive young people who, while partying at a (salt-water) lake house, get scooped out of the water by sharks… but there are no sex scenes, nude shots, or graphic shark-induced death sequences to speak of. Because this list of ‘teen-friendly’ omissions effectively robs a movie called Shark Night 3D of all its possible appeal, we are once again reminded that the film was made not for entertainment, but as a calculated business decision. Surely, the studio heads realized that adults had gotten their fill of this type of movie via last year’s Piranha 3D, so they decided to make a toned-down version for the 13-year-olds who failed to sneak into the Alexandre Aja picture.
What’s ironic about the PG-13 rating is that I’d far rather a 13-year-old watch Piranha 3D than Shark Night 3D. Robbed of their ability to employ T&A and over-the-top kills to entertain the audience, director David R. Ellis and screenwriters Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg turn to a story that is far more violent, sadistic, and misogynistic. By the ludicrous standards of the MPAA, unaccompanied teens cannot watch CGI sharks tear characters to shreds (only shots of the bloody results are acceptable), but human-on-human violence is a-OK. That the tone is far more serious than anything in Piranha 3D is insignificant. Shark Night 3D features a group of human antagonists who are just as dangerous as the sharks, as I hinted in the introduction (but don’t worry, if you really want to endure the movie for yourself, I will not spoil any more). They are hardly the bad guys of camp, instead coming across as truly disturbed… and not in a good way. As a result, Shark Night 3D becomes as perversely unenjoyable as a torture-porn film like Saw or Hostel, only without all the graphic details. Even though director Ellis was responsible for one of the funniest intentional B-movies of all-time in Snakes on a Plane, if you’re looking for silly fun, Shark Night 3D is not the ticket for you.
As for the 3D, which begs to be addressed given its mention in the title — it is yet another piece of this movie that was conceived for the financial, not artistic, benefits. Director Ellis did a nice job of leveraging the technology for cheap thrills in The Final Destination, but here it is primarily used to add meaningless depth to each shot. Even the few instances of objects flying out at the audience–a novel throwback three years ago–seem tired. Mostly, the glasses just make an already dark movie even darker (who thought it was a good idea to make a movie explicitly set at night in 3D!?) I saw Shark Night 3D on the brightest screen possible, with dual projectors, and I still strained to watch most of it. However, in this case, my recommendation is not that you see the film in 2D instead, but that you skip it altogether.
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Shark Night 3D (2011, USA). Produced by Chris Briggs, Douglas Curtis, Tawny Ellis Lehman, Mike Fleiss, Lynette Howell, Kelly McCormick, and Crystall Powell. Directed by David R. Ellis. Written for the screen by Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg. Starring Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack, Katharine McPhee, Chris Zylka, Alyssa Diaz, Joel David Moore, Sinqua Walls, Donal Logue, Joshua Leonard, and Jimmy Lee Jr. Distributed by Relativity Media. Rated PG-13, with a running time of 91 minutes.
