Rating: C+
Dir: Anthony C. Ferrante
Star: Angela Cole, Ashton Leigh, Johnny Ramey, Steve Hanks
Few directors have made more shark-themed movies than Ferrante. Most famous for all six Sharknado films, he also did another Tubi Original, Blind Waters. Unlike the tongue-in-cheek Sharknado franchise, that was played relatively straight, and Great White Waters is largely similar. I feel there’s some similarity to a movie I saw on Netflix, where a woman on a yacht was hijacked, and made to recover some underwater property for a group of criminals. But I’m damned if I can remember its name, and it is possible I dreamt the whole thing. Or perhaps it was just some kind of premonition relating to this. I really must stop having cheese as a bedtime snack.
Anyway, we have Gia Shah (Cole), who lost her other half in tragic – and, it is strongly implied, water-based – circumstances, five years ago. She still goes out diving in the Florida Keys, a pastime they used to share. But on one such excursion, she finds a glass jar, containing a package of drugs. The audience knows this is part of a shipment, dropped from the air into the water, belonging to mob boss Mr. Reverend (Hanks). But the recovery process went wrong after the arrival of a pack of sharks. He has now sent further minions, led by long-time associate Jareth Danzo (Ramey) and relative newcomer Charlotte Harlow (Leigh), to find out what happened. Putting it mildly, they are unhappy to find Gia in the area of the drop.
For the first half, this unfolds largely as you would expect. The shark effects and attacks are decently handled – few are as experienced in this area as Ferrante – but the drama, such as Gia’s mourning, feels rather clunky and overdone. I mean, do we really need to see a video of him singing a song he wrote for her? To be fair, his absence becomes more relevant in the end than initially thought, with the cause not what we expected. Indeed, there is a twist about halfway in, that turns things on their head. It brings up another threat, so that the smugglers are now stuck between a shark and a hard place. I almost felt sorry for them.
In addition, there is one quite glorious sequence late on, where it felt like Ferrante momentarily slipped back into Sharknado mode. I don’t want to spoiler it, but it involves that staple of shark movies, a low-flying helicopter. Though while I’m at it, why is Mr. Reverend coming out there himself? Has he run out of henchmen or something? I will say, the way this ends is about a shark attack short of being satisfactory, even if I did admire the use of one as an effective interrogation device. I trust the Department of Justice is taking notes. All told, I’d call it perfectly serviceable, albeit not especially memorable. The irony of watching this on the 4th of July, fifty years to the day after certain events in Amity, is certainly noted.