Great White Waters

The sharks at the beginning were real comic relief. An air drop of crates containing bottles of Reverends's Tea, and in each jar was likely cocaine. Unfortunately for those who went to pick up the crates, a swarm of very hungry sharks. So another group had to be sent out to pick up the drugs. At the same time, we meet Gia, who lost her husband, and is about to set out on a boat for some time off. And as luck would have it, she happens to be very near where the boat sent to pick up the drugs is headed. The people on that boat are suspicious of her being there, but she seems innocent enough. Sure there are plot holes, and the last act is preposterous, but grab the popcorn and sit back and not think. And the movie could be a lot worse. There are lots of sharks, but not doing things as much as in the opening act. The CGI sharks are a cut above the usual Asylum movie's special effects but still rather silly.

If only the ingenuity used to smuggle drugs could be put to more productive use! These guys have discovered a great wheeze to smuggle tons of cocaine into the USA by hiding it in jars of innocuous looking gunge. Unfortunately their boat sinks right in the middle of a shark feeding ground so their kingpin despatches a crack team of retrieval experts. Meantime, DEA agent "Gia" (Angela Cole) has recently been widowed and so is taking some time off diving near, well yes - you've guessed. Innocently enough, she approaches another boat crewed by "Charlotte" (Ashton Leigh) and her mean pal "Jareth" (Johnny Ramey) and is soon embroiled in helping them fetch their crates of precious cargo from the sea bed. She has some sort of gadget that deters the menacing sharks, but will that help keep them all alive? Will "Gia" want it too? Pretty swiftly we know all there is to know about these people, the identity of their kingpin on the land and so now we ought to be able to just settle back and hope that Mother Nature lets things take their course. Sadly, though, that might only have taken ten minutes and we have to fill ninety, so we now have to endure loads of banal dialogue and set-piece kick-boxing scenarios as the sharks play nowhere near a prominent enough role in this weakly structured and executed seagoing drama. The acting is fairly mediocre across the board and the ending is truly ridiculous. Without wishing to give anything away, but if a shark bit off your arm whilst you were paddling about on a dinghy, you'd be likely to be screaming your head off before dying of shock. I doubt you'd be sitting, draped in a swimming towel, having a chat! Yep, it's that kind of film that, given there's hardly anything of our underwater menace, I think is best avoided.

On the anniversary of her husband's death, a woman decides to recreate one of their most treasured memories together on a scuba-diving trip in the Florida Keys, unaware that the area is being patrolled by a group of thugs looking for sunken drugs in the same shark-infested waters.

This was a fairly solid if somewhat problematic genre effort. One of the better aspects to be had with this one comes from the strong and emotionally-charged setup that manages to provide this with some intriguing storylines. The main focus of her going around on the trip was that it meant a lot to her when her husband was alive, complete with her going through old memories to help reconnect with him on the trip, being used for healing as much as growth, once the situation had developed, once she came into contact with the drug-smugglers. The group looking for the remains of cargo left behind and sunken on the ocean floor in shark-infested waters and uses her as bait to complete their assignment creates a fun hurdle to complicate matters, so it all makes for a generally fun time, setting everything up. Once that happens and the involvement becomes about retrieving the cargo on the ocean floor, the film manages to generate some incredibly fun action scenes with the attempts to get everything collected. The mix of diving scenes featuring the group being ambushed by the sharks in their underwater dives or the scenes of them chasing after the group while trying to get to safety give this some decent enough sequences while also featuring the fun of the different attempts to keep the upperhand over her while they go about their plans for trapping everyone inside the boat as they deal with the sharks. The action in the finale is a lot of fun and helps to add an extra bit to this one, which is graced with quite a lot of effective shark effects, which give this one quite a lot to enjoy. There's not much in the way of flaws for this one, but it manages to have some detrimental ones. The main issue here is the film's insistence on way too many plotlines going on around the boat, with the businessman trying to get everything recovered to save face for the public, the secretive agent trying to keep her cover from the group, the dive for her husbands' memory of their relationship, and the different lies that emerge once she agrees to help them. Things get way too complicated in here, and it keeps the sharks out of the way for a bit longer than it should, with long stretches detailing the different storylines so the sharks are an obstacle more than anything else. Combined with the cheesiness of the overall film, these are what bring this down overall.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.