The Reef: Intrappolate

Sisters Cath and Nic with friends Jodie and Lisa have fun kayaking in the ocean. Nic is murdered by her partner and Cath is traumatized. Jodie and Lisa try to bring her back to life with another tropical vacation. They brought along younger sister Annie. The girls and local children get attacked by a great white shark.

It's another shark movie. The ladies are beautiful. There is some trauma before the shark. There is the shark. As often the case, the shark looks fine in the water, but can look bad when it comes out of the water. Worst still, it doesn't act real. Apparently, it's a battering ram and a stalker. It's the hallmark of a B-shark movie. As for the ladies, there are moments of poor judgement. It's the little things that they don't always do. It would also be reasonable to have one of the local woman join them. All in all, it's a below average shark movie.

I am a huge fan of "shark" movies and honestly in the last 5 years or so there was surprisingly many good movies with this theme. My top is definitely "Shallow" and very good one was "47 Meters Down".

This one has many flaws in very basic aspects in this genre.

What do you need? You need good CGi, you need good acting and most importantly you need great directing so it would feel realistic.

1. CGi is 50/50 , you have real sharks (or at least it looks like it) but the problem is it looks like a documentary movie, which is not a good sign. And then you have bad very unrealistic scenes with shark. So most of the time it doesn't fit the movie

2. Memorable scenes, you will not find a single one. And that is bad. You will see 10x the same scene with a fin on the surface, you will see lots of bubbles and splashes and you will see few times something under the surface (should be shark) that looks like someone draw it with a marker.

3. Victims and story. Sometimes filmmakers have tendency to forget what genre they are filming. This seems that case. This really feels like a drama with her personal trauma set in the water where by a chance is THE shark. It should be other way around. Another thing is, don't try to force some pathetic story to "catastrophic" movie. There is no need. This should be about surviving, not about trying to overcome your fears of diving. On top of that when you lost someone, it is more than obvious they will not make a movie you will loose someone else. So after 10 min you know who will survive and who will not.

It's not hard to have a right vision for this kind of movies, but why filmmakers are trying to do something "more" is beyond me?!

Overall this is slightly below average movie. There is really no need to watch this because you will be disappointed and after 40mins you will check how many more minutes it will take to end this "journey"

The Reef: Stalked (2022) is a standard bad movie. This movie is slow in the first 10 to 20 minutes, and it takes its time to get to the shark attacks.

The characters are standard, and when you see a backstory for one of the characters it does not give much for you to get behind them. I mostly did not care enough about them surviving the shark attacks.

The shark had a stock footage feel to it and when it attacks, I cannot see what is happening. The shark takes its time when attacking the characters, and it does things I do not believe it would do.

The shark attack scenes have a lot of shaky cam bubbles covering up what is happening, and the movie has an ending that I thought was average and slow paced.

I cannot recommend The Reef: Stalked (2022), because this movie is boring at times, and it has false jump scares or jump scares you can see coming.

I'm gonna keep this short. Terrible acting. Like really terrible. Very poor script. Like most shark movies obviously takes inspiration from "Jaws" but it's barely the same sport.

Characters doing stupid things and saying even dumber things. When talking about sharks one of the characters actually says "It's the big ones you need to look out for".

Dismissed.

A group of friends go into the water, and encounter a white shark.

Not the most original plot it's fair to say, however there are a couple of shark movies that make the grade, because they offer something original, something a little different, sadly this is not one of them, it is instantly forgettable, with nothing of any particular note happening. It's another of those movies that does nothing to promote the wonder of sharks, just plays into an outdated idea of them being man eating monsters from The Sea.

There are a few moments of suspense, I'll give it that, a couple of scenes where you don't quite know what's going to happen, or where the shark is, so I'll applaud them for that, I'll also say I quite liked the music in parts too, it wasn't overdone.

The major problems though, first off, the acting, it wasn't particularly good, and secondly the shark itself, I'm not a shark expert by any means, but this one, was behaving in a very strange way, I'm not sure they behave in such a way, I could be wrong.

It's not often you watch a film like this and root for the shark, however on this occasion, I did.

4/10.