What you have to remember is that the streamers are stuck with the same problem as the big movie studios back in the day when Hollywood was broken up into majors (MGM, Fox, , Paramount, Columbia etc) and mini-majors (United Artists, Disney, Embassy etc). The bigger the studio the more movies – in the 1950s/1960s, for example – you were expected to churn out. You had to feed the exhibitor system and if you cut back on production, exhibitors would stop favoring your product.
But there was no way every film you made was a big-budget production helmed by a top-name director and headlined by a top male and female star. For a start, there were not enough stars to go round, though certainly far more than the paltry handful who have any marquee attraction today, and studios could not afford to turn out so many films with big budgets.
But at least they were initially fair to exhibitors and the public. The lesser productions were tabbed B-pictures and they didn’t carry the marketing weight of the bigger movies.
And when the B-picture per se disappeared, the movies that came in at the lower end of the budget scale were called “programmers.” They were movies that filled a slot, heading out into distribution as the supporting feature, or going out on a wave of advertising in the knowledge that they would not last more than one week anywhere, once word-of-mouth came out.
So the problem for the streamers is that they can’t differentiate. They don’t own up to the fact that there’s just no way they can produce a substantial number of original content features a year so that subscribers feel they’re getting a good deal. So every new film is given the same big-push treatment.
This is just a programmer and misses the shark mark by a big margin. Not only is there no attempt to beef up the narrative – if not Paris, find a way for sharks to invade New York or London, why doncha – it’s nearly half the picture before the marauder appears and unlike others in the mini-genre nobody’s taken the trouble to come up with some scientific mumbo-jumbo to explain its unlikely presence in the a bunch freshwater Thailand caves.
And none of the characters are remotely interesting or jar with each other in an interesting fashion. There’s so much whooping of delight going on that it’s about as loud as the later screams.
And I’m not sure that the cheesecake/beefcake element can sustain the picture for 100 minutes, not when the buffed bodies are, with one exception, so empty-headed. You’re waiting for the shark – c’mon already – to start whittling down their number because they’re just so annoying.
The best scene has nothing to do with sharks. Sara (Kathryn Newton) – the only character of any interest – is attacked by a swarm of jellyfish and when the camera pulls back to reveal that she’s not just being stung by one of the creatures but has swum into a whole nest of them, that strikes a sharp note. Of course, one minute she’s wailing for her life, twisting this way and that, and the next she’s safe on the boat.
You might be tempted to keep going because you want to see easily the most annoying character, the big-mouth know-it-all Max (Lana Condor), get hers. But no such luck, because she’s whining all the way to the end. When their guide does a runner, there should be tension as they have to find a way out from the maze of caves but unfortunately, they don’t appear to have a single brain cell between them. Scooby Doo would have had a better chance of solving the puzzle.
And the shark ain’t much to write home about either although he’s pretty good on the threshing front and inclined, for reasons that are soon revealed as narrative necessity, to batter his head off the cave walls. This picture is so lacking in common sense that even though one of the group has a knife they don’t think to rip out the creature’s eyes when it’s trapped in a hole in the cave.
This started life as an acclaimed screenplay called Apex so who knows what happened to it along the way. It’s perfectly possibly that one of the trapped quintet could make it big in the movie business in the future and can look and laugh at this turkey and laugh.
Kathryn Newton (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, 2026) can’t hold this together and director Jeff Wadlow (Imaginary, 2024) should have known better than to try. Debut screenwriting gig for Aja Gabel (Five Star Weekend series, 2026) and Myung Joh Wesner (Skeleton Crew series, 2024).
You know how big a fan I am of shark movies, so I don’t need much to whet my appetite. This doesn’t come close
Another dud from Amazon Prime.
The Magnificent 60s 