Those of you who thought Netflix would be better served by abandoning its overblown self-indulgent Oscar bait in favor of B-pictures have had their prayers answered. Both hilariously bad and hilariously good with plenty gore but not a scare in sight. Questions will be asked about how many CGI sharks were harmed in the making.
While there are plenty of opportunities to rack up the tension with a bundle of sequences calling out for the Steven Spielberg treatment, writer-director Tommy Wirkola doesn’t take up a single one. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of greatness if not pure genius. When teenager Dee (Alyla Browne) is called upon to act as midwife for heavily pregnant unnamed New Yorker (Phoebe Dynovor), the poor lass is instructed to look “down there” and work out by how many inches the older woman is dilated. Plus you can’t get more woke than the pregnant lady achieving a genuine water birth, although, as you can imagine, the bloody aftermath attracts a bunch of sharks.
Did I forget to mention the sharks racing ashore in the wake of a storm surge, homing in on a meat wagon that has broken in two and spilled its cargo of blood. I suppose the newborn child is to make up for all the parentless kids. I counted four – Dee and three foster kids. While Dee just takes it out on the sharks, the fostered trio take revenge on their greedy foster dad by kicking him into the water as shark food.
Wirkola does adopt the Spielberg playbook to destroy some sharks through an explosion and kill another with a harpoon gun and employs the Jurassic World technique of one predator being gobbled up by an even bigger predator. And I guess shark hunter Dr Edwards (Djimon Hounsou) can easily top Robert Shaw’s U.S.S. Indianapolis speech – he became obsessed with sharks once he saw the fear they instilled in a hippo. Yep, you heard that right. Did I mention that the good doctor is on the trail of Nellie the pregnant Great White Shark. “Sharks don’t eat kids,” claims the bad dad.
None of the grown-ups, not even our pregnant New Yorker, is worth a button as adults. She’s foolish enough to get herself trapped in a car by driving into a fallen-down tree when told to go the other way. Then she thinks that a pregnant woman wins out every time over a teenager scared witless. It’s the teenager that in the middle of the flood has to slide down a car roof and teeter along the top of a fence to rescue the New Yorker trapped in flood waters in her car by a tree branch. It’s quite a hairy moment for the teenager and you wonder just how the heck is the heavily pregnant woman going to get to safety what with the water six feet deep and the marauding sharks and all that teetering and climbing. Hey-ho, she gets a free pass. One minute she’s in the car, the next she’s climbing through a window.
And she’s as entitled as all-get-out. It’s Dee who has to clamber onto the storm-soaked roof and improvise the word “help” out of curtains. And it’s lucky that Dee, as pointed out in a flashback, is such an ace shot. Judging from the one time she took aim at her dad with a toy gun that was more than enough of a demonstration as to how lethal she would be pinpointing a shark from a range of 20 metres.
But I can’t help thinking what Spielberg would have made of the scene when thanks to the force of the water the New Yorker’s bed starts rising to the ceiling or when the house collapses beneath her. My guess is both sequences would have last more than a minute.
Alyla Browne (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, 2024) steals the show, not least because she has the wits to look terrified rather than coolly heroic. Phoebe Dynovor (Anniversary, 2025) has a pretty thankless task trying to win sympathy from such an unsympathetic character. It looked to me that the ending hinted at a sequel, so you have been warned.
Tommy Wirkola (Violent Night, 2022) would have done better if he’d either taken it more seriously or gone down the opposite route.
I’m probably not the only one either who thinks Netflix could have been more honest with the title and omitted the first letter “h”.
Either a cult in the making or pure rubbish.
The Magnificent 60s 