Been spending most their lives livin’ in a bull shark’s paradise. Coolio finds himself in Red Water (2003) #SharkWeak2 Review

A tiny bit of a step down from the glossy multiplex-friendly “Deep Blue Sea”, this 2003 TV movie may dial down the star wattage somewhat but it doesn’t turn the lights out completely: Lou Diamond Phillips! Kristy Swanson! Coolio! I mean, come on – what more could you want?

Down-on-his-luck boat owner John Sanders is thrown a financial lifeline when his ex-wife Dr Kelli Raymond (Kristy Swanson) charters his boat to take her to a small oil rig to investigate some environmental concerns at the same time gangster Ice (Coolio) and his associates are heading to the same area to recover some abandoned loot from a previous job. And as if that wasn’t enough, a rogue bull shark has swum upriver too.

It’s already an unusually diverse Shark Weak as we still haven’t had an appearance by the usual star of the show, the legendary Great White. “Deep Blue Sea” offered us Mako and Tiger sharks, and “Red Water” brings us the legitimately fearsome Bull Sharks, an aggressive species who are at home in both salt and fresh water.

The film sets itself up structurally as a disaster movie, carefully setting out its disparate clusters of characters who will, eventually, cross paths and have to join forces against the force of nature to survive. There’s a low-key environmental message underpinning the drama with early scenes heavily implying that the banks and corporations are the real sharks. There’s even a hint of mysticism (left largely unexplored by the film) in the suggestion that the bull shark’s appearance is the manifestation of nature objecting to the oil drilling in the bayou.

It’s actually not that bad a film and while it often promises more than it delivers (there’s a point where a tour guide cautions her group to keep an eye out for the Louisiana Black Bear that made me hope against hope for a showdown twixt bear and shark that fails to materialise) but it motors along quite nicely, resting as much of the performance of its experienced leads as it does its kills and effects.

The effects are a curiously mixed bag especially in the early parts of the movie. There are some really poor CGI and a few dodgy model shots but in the final third of the film, there’s also some genuinely impressive model and animatronic work that belies the fact this was a made-for-TV potboiler.

It’s a lean, well-made thriller, part monster movie/ part heist, that avoids many of the clichés such as long treks through forests or time spent away from the water to pad things out that you often see in shark movies and it’s refreshingly down to earth in its approach to the shark. Throw in some well crafted underwater action scenes and you’ve got a movie which, while it won’t win any awards, at least makes it worthwhile to watch a former Buffy Summers trying to avoid some unwelcome toothsome attention once again.

5/10 

logo

Related posts

Cars 3 (2017) Review

Cars 3 (2017) Review


Cars 3 (2017) Review

“Cars 3” begins by doing what most right-thinking people do, which is pretending “Cars 2” simply doesn’t exist. It then moves on to hoping you don’t really remember “Cars” particularly well as it sets out to tell the same story once again, only this time it’s Lightning McQueen who’s the...

Rush (2013) Review

Rush (2013) Review


Rush (2013) Review

I'm not a fan of Formula One or motor racing and so had only the vaguest awareness of both Nikki Lauda and James Hunt going into "Rush". What got my backside in a seat was partly the trailer and cast but mainly the identity of the director: Ron Howard. Aside from his flaccid, lifeless Dan...

Wow! The Downton Abbey spin-off movie was way edgier than I expected. Ready Or Not (2019) Review

Wow! The Downton Abbey spin-off movie was way edgier than I expected. Ready Or Not (2019) Review


Wow! The Downton Abbey spin-off movie was way edgier than I expected. Ready Or Not (2019) Review

As the members of a wealthy and powerful family gather at their stately home to celebrate the wedding of their firstborn son, bride Grace (Samara Weaving) is nervous about her new family accepting her. With the wedding service behind her, there’s only one more thing to attend to: a quaint family...

Japanese high school girls are in big trouble in surreal blood-drenched art-house horror Tag (2015)

Japanese high school girls are in big trouble in surreal blood-drenched art-house horror Tag (2015)


Japanese high school girls are in big trouble in surreal blood-drenched art-house horror Tag (2015)

Very much not the bawdy Jeremy Renner comedy vehicle, “Tag” is a movie I’ll cheerfully admit to having tracked down after a bizarre gif piqued my morbid curiosity. Given that the gif shows a scene from the first ten minutes of the movie and it just gets weirder and more bizarre from there, that...