Rating: B-
Dir: Huanxiang Chen
Star: Fan Dong, Xiaoxuan Wei, Xin Zer Tan, Xin Cai
Despite a clunky title, this isn’t bad at all. Indeed, the opening sequence is as good as I’ve seen in the When Chinese Animals Attack genre. A shark-poaching vessel bites off more than it can chew, with a gigantic fish turning the hunters into the hunted. Its three-person crew then end up being bitten off themselves, hohoho. This is a very well-assembled sequence, full of tension, and making good use of both music and silence. It’s a bit of a shame nothing the rest of the way quite reaches the same level of excellence. Anyway, in the same area is a pleasure yacht, on which a slew of attractive young people are having a floating birthday party.
There’s a little more going on, because Wu Liang (Tan) is planning an elaborate marriage proposal to his supermodel girlfriend, Chen Yanyan (Wei), involving a fake shark attack, scuba diving and an undersea ring-box. Also present is Cheng Yufei (Dong), who might be an ex of Wu’s – the subtitles are a little unclear on this detail, containing lines like, “There is no centrifugal force when you turn in circles”. The supposedly fake shark attack gets replaced by a painfully real one. It means that the survivors of the first wave, end up in the water, and then on the deserted boat which belonged to the poachers. With it going nowhere, due to a badly fouled propeller, and no supplies on board, they have to figure out how to get back to their own yacht.
After the early surge of shark activity, this settles down for much of the running-time as more of a survival story. Cheng is about the only person not mangled in some way, leaving her to try and organize the survival strategy. Which largely consists of firing flares off randomly, though she does jury-rig a system to distill sea-water into potable liquid. By the standards of the genre, the characters here aren’t bad. Chen in particular goes from a vacuous and annoying airhead, to someone I was at least moderately interested in seeing make it to the end of the movie. However, given the title, I was expecting rather more… well, evil shark. The movie almost forgets its own title in the middle.
Things get back on track at the end, when Cheng and Chen decide their only option is to clear the boat’s propeller. This means one of them going into the water at the bow to lure the shark, while the other is at the stern, removing the debris. This, at least, gets close to the opening sequence in terms of tension, though the ending is so abrupt as to suggest the makers ran out of money, interest or both. However, it’s still definitely a fin or two above the average, especially in the sequences which book-end the movie, and the effects are reasonably well-executed too. Probably not quite evil though; I’d say more like misunderstood.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.