Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

Shark Night Blu-ray Movie Review

About as much fun as a bucket of chum.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater January 3, 2012

Critics have an inexhaustible wealth of cliche metaphors at their disposal to describe the utter dullness of Shark Night: It arrives "dead in the water." It's "washed up." It "barely makes a splash" but also "totally bellyflops." It "lacks bite" and "drowns in mediocrity" and "makes Shark Attack 3: Megalodon look like Jaws." All would be appropriate. (Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch.) Director David R. Ellis, of Snakes on a Plane infamy, has accomplished no easy feat--he's made a boring shark movie. Most serious shark film fans don't need another masterpiece on par with Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic; they just want something reasonably entertaining to tide them over until the Discovery Channel's annual "Shark Week." Something with a decent plot and well-written characters, or--failing that--at least a modicum of blood-in-the-water carnage and white-knuckle suspense. Others crave over-the-top B-movie corniness and get their aquatic kicks from the likes of Megashark Versus Giant Octopus or Shark in Venice. Both groups will yawn at Shark Night, a tame, PG-13 excursion that lacks the terrifying realism of Open Water and doesn't come close to reaching the nutty, perverse highs of Piranha 3D, the film to which it draws the most unfortunate comparisons.

Fish food...

Where Piranha uses 3D in a winking, self-aware way, Shark Night, which was released theatrically as Shark Night 3D, is gimmickry for the sake of gimmickry, and doesn't even do it that particularly well. You can expect all of the usual pop-out-of-the-screen nonsense, from CGI sharks lunging toward you, toothy mouths agape, to boats careening through the air...on fire...in slow motion. Or, well, you could've expected it, if 20th Century Fox had decided to release a proper 3D Blu-ray version of the film. But they didn't. Instead, what we have here is a flattened 2D edition, which makes the obvious "oh wow! 3D!" moments look even more artificial and out of place. This is rather damning when the only thing the film has going for it is 3D spectacle. You're certainly not going to find any satisfaction in the story, a standard-issue slasher--or "chomper," I guess--that pits a group of stereotypical college kids against several varieties of man-eating sharks.

The film's first mistake is a first act that takes way too long to set up. It's party time, and the future shark snacks of New Orleans' Tulane University are amping themselves up for a weekend of beer-pong, sunbathing, and light debauchery. There's med-school hopeful Nick (Dustin Milligan) and his dopey, Halo-playing dorm-mate, Gordon (Avatar's Joel David Moore), star football player Malik (Sinqua Walls)--who hopes to propose to his girlfriend Maya (Alyssa Diaz)--and a few others hotties who, let's face it, are merely shark fodder. Their destination is a remote island--out of cell phone range, naturally--on Louisiana's saltwater Lake Crosby, where they'll be staying at shy, secret-hiding co-ed Sarah Powski's (Sara Paxton) plush family cabin. Tragedy first strikes when Malik goes x-treme wakeboarding and gets his arm munched off by an out-of-place bull shark that presumably wandered up-river from the ocean. At least, that's what we're meant to believe. I'll throw down a spoiler alert here for those uptight about plot twists, but trust me, this film is so stale to begin with that I'm not sure it even could be spoiled.

See, Shark Night isn't just a man-versus nature monster movie, it's also a rednecksploitation horror tale about two voyeuristic and enterprising bait-shop owners--the propeller-scarred Dennis (Chris Carmack) and his toothy pal Red (Joshua Leonard)--who have somehow stocked the lake with sharks, rigged the sleek beasts up with HD cameras, and plan to sell the inevitably bloody footage to sickos over the Internet. Oh look! It's an attempt at social relevancy! There's even a sketchy sheriff (Donal Logue) of the "is-he-or-isn't-he-a-good-guy" variety who delivers a marble-mouthed speech about today's "moral relativism." It's basically feardotcom meets Deep Blue Sea meets Deliverance--a New Media-inspired thriller about shark-wrangling swamp bumpkins--but, you know, half-hearted and perfunctory and uninteresting.

The "hell, we's a gonna start our own version'a Shark Week" premise is underdeveloped, and really only serves as an excuse to show bikini babes and bare-chested hunks getting offed by CGI sharks. Which, to be fair, is all that some people want from this kind of film. But Shark Night doesn't even do gratuitous nudity and gore well. Saddled with a PG-13 rating--and there's no "Unrated Director's Cut" here--the movie can only get away with peeks of "side-boob" and attacks that consist mostly of thrashing and cloudy red water. Compared to Piranha 3D, Shark Night is kid's stuff. It also falls into an awkward in-between category, too goofy to be taken seriously, but not nearly ridiculous enough-- despite sharks that roar, chase motorboats, and leap unrealistically out of the water--to be full-on, guilty pleasure entertainment. What's a movie like this worth if it's 1.) not scary, 2.) not, for a lack of a better word, titillating, or 3.) not fun? The answer, of course, is not much.

Shark Night Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For home video, Shark Night 3D has been downgraded to simply Shark Night, and 20th Century Fox has given no indication that a 3D Blu-ray is in the works. Perhaps the studio realized that even 3D TV owners--who are starved for new 3D releases--probably wouldn't bother with this garbage. What's especially awkward here is that there are several scenes that prominently feature imagery that's clearly supposed to be in 3D--sharks jumping out of the screen, boats jumping out of the screen, random other aquatic do-dads jumping out of the screen, etc. Flattened to two dimensions, the gimmicky hokeyness of these shots is plainly revealed. But whatever. In regular old 2D, the film features a 1080p/AVC-encoded digital- to-digital transfer that's fine but hardly spectacular. In terms of clarity, this is very much a hit or miss situation. Some shots are extremely sharp and display lots of fine, high definition detail--skin and clothing texture, defined hair and foliage--where others are a bit soft, especially ones with a lot of CGI additions. (The animatronic sharks are passably believable at times, but the digital ones always look fake.) Color is bright and sunshiny and adequately dense, but the lighting is often flat and directionless, which gives the film a cheap, almost made-for-TV look. Contrast is okay though--providing you can overlook a few instances of blown-out highlights--and black levels are as deep as they need to be. There's aren't any major compression-related distractions, but you might notice some slight banding in the blue gradient of the sky on occasion, and noise that spikes during darker scenes.

Shark Night Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shark Night surfaces on Blu-ray with Fox's standard DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound presentation, and the mix is as much of a mixed bag as the video quality. The main issue here is that there are scenes where the dialogue is almost completely overpowered by extremely bass-heavy music. This isn't frequent, but it does occur often enough that it's worth mentioning. When this would happen, my first instinct was to bump up the volume, but of course that just made the music louder. I'd tell you to resort to subtitles, but honestly, you're not missing much by not being able to make out the dialogue. In other respects--like surround sound implementation--the track fares better. The rear channels get used fairly often for effects and ambience, from splashes, screams, and underwater gurgles, to shrapnel that flies outward through the soundfield when the kids' boat explodes. Most of the effects are meaty and anchored by plenty of low-end rumble. When the blaring music doesn't mask the vocals--which, to be fair, is most of the time--dialog is clean and comprehensible. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, which appear in easy-to-read white lettering.

Shark Night Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Shark Attack! Kill Machine! (1080p, 5:43): All the kills from the movie strung together in a five-minute sequence. Watch this instead of the whole film and save yourself almost an hour and a half.
• Shark Night's Survival Guide (1080p, 4:08): A collection of dumb trivia about shark attacks, using clips from the film as illustrations.
• Fake Sharks, Real Scares (1080p, 5:24): A featurette about the film's animatronic and CGI sharks.
• Ellis' Island (1080p, 4:22): A short making-of piece, with interviews and on-set footage.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 1:59)
• Sneak Peeks (1080p, 10:10)

Shark Night Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Shark Night isn't awful--it's competently filmed and features actors who do what they can with their underwritten roles--but it just doesn't deliver the kind of visceral and/or over-the-top experience that genre fans want from this sort of movie. Fox's Blu-ray presentation is decent, but I'd skip this release and look into other recent shark-related titles, like The Reef, or just save your money until Jaws makes its high definition debut this August. Shark Night just isn't worth your time.