Only two things come from Texas: steers and shit shark movies, and I don’t see no horns on Bull Shark
Famously, they say everything is bigger in Texas, but they clearly hadn’t seen Bull Shark, a badly acted, duller, cheaper version of Jaws—although even that comparison might be giving it too much credit.
A small Texas town is thrown into a tedious amount of administrative infighting when a pregnant bull shark is caught in the waters of the local lake. Fearing the negative publicity, local alcoholic, on-the-cusp-of-divorce Game Warden Spencer (Thom Hallum) orders the fisherman to dispose of the catch. But instead, the fisherman throws the catch back into the lake, and while mama shark is dead, her babies are content to eat their way out and then start chowing down on the locals and their pets.
I don’t know why—after all, this is the 99th Shark Weak movie I’ve reviewed—but I’m always surprised by how cheap these films look. Bull Shark is cheaply shot on digital, flatly lit, and often dramatically inert. Characterisation is fairly basic and character development virtually non-existent. There’s clearly an intent to replicate the complex local politics of Spielberg’s classic but there’s little credibility in Bull Shark, and certainly no amity. There is, however, a bizarrely intense rivalry between our “hero”, the Game Warden, and the local Sheriff (Derrick Redford) that so strongly borders on the homoerotic there are points where you just wish they’d f*** and get it out of their system. The main players in this municipal kitchen sink drama are rounded out by Richard Ray as Mayor Groves, whose sole focus is his own re-election, and Tiffany McDonald, the world’s most casual medical examiner. The acting performances are wooden enough to build a new dock on the shark-infested lake. Thom Hallum’s performance resembles a mannequin more than a man in multiple crises, and his colleagues, apparently chosen for their ability to deliver lines with the emotional depth of a cereal box, contribute to a viewing experience that’s as engaging as watching paint dry.
What does feel authentically Texan about Bull Shark is its abject grasp of basic biology and a tendency to believe that the best way to approach a problem is to try shooting it. The movie’s titular choice of shark is, at least, a good one for this freshwater-set farce. It’s unfortunate, then, that the special effects team have almost exclusively used cheap CGI great white shark models. As to the rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ shark hunting tactics, the sooner the makers of bad shark movies learn about how ineffective bullets are the moment they hit the water, the better.
Bull Shark might have been fun if it was prepared to embrace its own absurdity, but instead everything is played deadly serious, and it sucks the life out of the movie. It’s not so-bad-it’s-good; it’s just plain bad. And given there’s not one but two sequels already, it’s clearly not going to be safe to go back into Texan waters for some time yet.
