Rating: C
Dir: Phillip J. Roth
Star: Lorenzo Lamas, Simmone Mackinnon, Jeffrey Gorman, Stefan Lysenko
For our third and final entry in Shitty Shark Movie Week 2024 (brought to you by Tubi, not that they really know it), we go back into the vaults. To be fair, this wasn’t deeply shitty. Sure, stupid as hell, and not able to sustain its 93 minutes. But compared to what we’ve endured earlier this week, I’m grabbing onto mediocrity like a drowning man clutching a life-belt. It started off on wobbly ground, expecting us to believe that Lamas’s character, Dane Quatrell, has a PhD in marine biology, which is almost “radio astronomer Charlie Sheen” levels of implausibility. However, it turns out he’s largely a suave scammer, seeking funds to go “looking for Atlantis”. This is much more credible.
But it’s he and sidekick Robin Turner (Mackinnon) who are the ones getting scammed here, blackmailed into lending their talents (and research sub) to shady industrialist Summerville, who might be tied to the disappearance, decades ago, of Dane’s father. He needs them to investigate an undersea facility, several thousand feet below the surface, which has gone radio silent. Showing up, they find one corpse, two missing personnel, and soon discover what happened, after an unprovoked attack on the complex by a pack of sharks. Dane, Robin and ex-CIA operative John Miklos (Gorman) pass out from lack of oxygen, waking to find themselves on a black ops sub under Captain Yarborough (Lysenko). Turns out they’re responsible for the sharks, and are trying to turn them into controllable animals.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Admittedly, both the US and Soviet Navies have tried to create what Wikipedia delightfully calls, “Military marine mammals.” But sharks feel rather less malleable. I mean, has nobody here seen Deep Blue Sea? Also, I would have to question the security protocols here, which allow a shady marine biologist and pals to escape, wreaking havoc throughout the sub. It helps that Robin seems a bit of a bad-ass, cut from the Lara Croft school of explorers, albeit with a cheerful fondness for statutory rape. Yeah, that’s aged well. On the other hand, there’s a sequence which seems entirely dedicated to getting her white T-shirt very wet, though it provides disappointingly little payoff. Haven’t they seen The Deep either?
The Dane and Robin chemistry is the best thing about this, with their interactions providing more entertainment than, to be honest, the sharks. Those are underused and not very well-animated, even allowing for the twenty-plus years of technological advancement since this. Still, I was hoping for more action from them, rather than extended run-and-gun sequences through the submarine – which would surely not be the best location to be unleashing automatic weapons. There is, naturally, a revelation about the fate of Dane’s father, on the way to an ending which suggests the makers were hoping for a globe-trotting franchise, probably with Lamas as Argentina Jones. The lack of any further such entries tell you all you need to know about this.