Rating: C-
Dir: Jo-Anne Brechin.
Star: Virginia Gardner, Mel Jarnson, Mitchell Hope.
Killer whales have always had an image problem. The first written account was by Pliny in 70 AD, who described them as, “an enormous mass of savage flesh with teeth.” Despite there being no confirmed incidents of them having killed humans in the wild, there’s still that awkward name. They need to hire a PR firm and rebrand themselves as ‘sea pandas’. Though, personally, I don’t trust them. I think they would be highly capable of eating us. They just don’t cross paths with us in the water often enough, being more deep-sea denizens. But they never had their Jaws moment. Orca doesn’t exactly count, does it? After all, it was mostly sympathetic – a revenge flick for cetaceans.
This adopts a similar approach. The kille… um, sea panda here is Ceto, a captive orca driven a bit mad by her incarceration in Thailand. After killing a worker, she gets flushed into a nearby lagoon, where American tourist Maddie (Gardner), her influencer friend Trish (Jarnson), and local beach-bum Josh (Hope) encounter Ceto. Maddie is mentally recovering from a robbery the previous year, in which her boyfriend was killed. Now, she and Trish end up stuck on a rock, while Ceto circles menacingly. It’s basically a cross between Fall – Gardner starred in that too – and The Shallows, with Trish replacing the seagull there. Except the seagull was less annoying, and Fall delivered a properly sweaty palmed experience. For a more accurate title here would be Whiny Millenials.
The whale stuff is fine, with the attacks well executed. There just isn’t enough of them, especially in the middle, when I wondered if the orca had died of boredom, such was its absence. Instead, you get Maddie and Trish flapping their gums at each other. No, we do not care about the reasons why Maddie gave up playing the cello. Nor are we shocked by the Big Secret Trish is carrying around. We are watching a movie entitled Killer Whale. It’s not a stretch to conclude we are here to see a whale, killing. Yet the film-makers regard this as a side-dish, instead pressing us to another helping of overcooked guilt. Ceto should fire her agent, because she deserves far better.
This has the advantage of sea pandas being considered smart adversaries. If you have seen the footage of them collaborating to slosh seals off ice-floes, you’ll know that. Here, there are odd occasions where this intelligence does come through, to the extent Ceto seems considerably more clever than Maddie or Trish. She may be more sympathetic too, with even the women admitting they kinda see where she’s coming from. Which may be a problem in itself. At no point in Jaws did anyone pause to suggest that Bruce might have a point. These considerations do help distract from some severely wobbly green-screen work. Though I guess the discovery no real sea pandas were used or abused in the making of this, counts for something.