THE REQUIN

Stars: Alicia Silverstone, James Tupper, Deirdre O’Connell, Jennifer Mudge, Kha Mai and Danny Chung.
Writer/Director: Le-Van Kiet

Rating: ★ ★ ½

If you’re a stickler for detail (for the sake of this logically care-free film, I hope you’re not), the title should read ‘Le Requin’ - the full French pronunciation of ‘The Shark’. But why give an American film a French title? Or half-a-French title, for that matter? And why call it The Requin or Le Requin or The Shark at all…and then not shark-up for over an hour?

Which is not to imply that married couple Jaelyn (Alicia Silverstone) and Kyle (James Tupper) spend the first 60-odd minutes just being touristy (although they do that, too); they are recovering from their own watery tragedy, having lost a child during a home birth. Jaelyn has serious PTSD, especially on or near water, leading Kyle at one point to surmise that their seaside, tropical island suite was maybe not the best idea for a getaway-from-it-all destination.

It is off-season, which means monsoons, and soon their floating villa is ripped from its moorings and cast out to sea. While the dread of deep-sea predation is always present (unlike any form of rescue craft), it is the elements that pose the greatest threat. Jaelyn and Kyle go through the various stages of existential turmoil one would experience on a raft that was once your bedroom floor - panic, mostly, some bleeding, then accidentally setting fire to your bedroom-raft.

Tupper does all he needs to do on-screen as the wounded husband, but it is 90s it-girl Silverstone who leaves nothing on the acting table as Jaelyn. In partnership with her unmistakable stunt stand-in, she gets to go head-to-snout with sharks of various sizes in water depths prone to change mid-shot. Silverstone brings physicality and a great set of lungs to the more brutal moments, while capturing the grief and sadness of Jaelyn’s emotional ruin in small but effective scenes. It’s good seeing her back in a lead role, even if she gives more than the material deserves.

The alpha predator at the centre of the action is Carcharodon carcharias, or The Great White Shark. They don’t typically live in the tropical waters off the Vietnamese coast (tiger sharks and various breeds of reef sharks populate these regions), but we’ll let that slide. Spielberg did such a job on the shark’s image back in ‘75, flashing a close-up of that black eye (”like a doll’s eye”) is still the perfect cinematic shorthand for terror. The film does little else to earn it’s own sense of dread (unlike 2003’s Open Water or 2010’s The Reef) or provide the creature with some dimensionality (like 2016’s The Shallows), but as the latest sharksploitation riff, it works well enough.          

The Requin is Vietnamese director Le Van-Kiet dipping his toe (no pun intended) into the Hollywood industrial complex, after making a big splash (meant that one) with his 2019 festival hit, Furie, which was a great film. Aside from a few stock footage inserts of Hanoi streets and underwater wonderlands, his drama is staged in the tank space and against the green-screens of Universal Studios in Orlando. The ‘uncanny valley’ downside of CGI used to create that with which we are familiar takes a chunk out of key moments of suspense - the shark footage waivers from fleetingly convincing to…less so - but by minute 80, Kiet knows that his audience is in for les penny, in for les pound.

THE MEG

Stars: Jason Statham, Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, Winston Chao, Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy, Jessica McNamee, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Robert Taylor, Shuya Sophia and Masi Oka.
Writers: Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber.
Director: Jon Turteltaub.

Rating: 2/5

For a movie so cynically calculated to hit all-important commercial KPIs, so much feels miscalculated about The Meg. The cheapest looking US$125million film ever made, joyless journeyman Jon Turteltaub’s big-shark movie drags the anchor for most of its interminable 113 minutes.  From the bored action lead routinely grimacing, to the beast itself, blessed with the natural skill to change size at will, The Meg seems destined to only find favour with snarky podcasters seeking schlocky targets for ridicule. 

The central ‘plot’ concerns a boozy ex-diver called Jonas (think about it…actually, don’t), drinking his life away in Thailand having lost two colleagues in the film’s lackluster prologue. Jason Statham plays ‘PTSD grief’ as script directions to be ignored; when called upon to return to the ocean depths to save a stranded submersible that contains his ex-wife (Jessica McNamee), he monologues with a grin about why he won’t do it, then jumps on board a helicopter to do it.

The clincher is that his ex may have just seen the same prehistoric beast that Jonas claimed was responsible for his crew’s death. Soon, he is on board the Mana One, an underwater research facility overseen by scumbag entrepreneur Rainn Wilson and peopled by Cliff Curtis’ boss-man, Ruby Rose’ feisty operations manager, Page Kennedy’s shrill nuisance DJ (the film’s most thankless part) and Li Bingbings’ single mother scientist (asked to pull off some excrutiating sentimentality with her on-screen daughter, Sophia Cai, and some chemistry-free romantic sparks with her leading man).

It takes Turteltaub and his trio(!) of writers 40-odd  minutes to shoehorn their moneymaker into the action, the Megalodon’s first appearance recalling the T-Rex reveal in Jurassic Park (the first and last time the movies will be compared, rest assured). The special effects that bring the Meg to life run the gamut from state-of-the-art (a midpoint sequence in which the shark closes in on Statham and Bingbing as they are being reeled in is the film’s best action) to Jaws-3 clunky. The PG-13 framework means kills are meagre by any horror buff’s measure; barring one legitimately hilarious sight gag involving a helicopter pilot, humour is barren (note to the producers – you owe the Sharknado franchise an acknowledgement for stealing their closing shot gag).

Everything about the movie – the cool posters, the fun trailer, the decade-long development history, the mystery behind what horror auteur Eli Roth once might have seen in the insipid material  – is infinitely more interesting than anything that made it into the movie. The Meg is so bound to the ‘studio blockbuster’ template, it never breathes; that’s perhaps appropriate, given its waterlogged staidness, but it leaves this hulking behemoth dead in the water.

THE SHALLOWS

Stars: Blake Lively, Oscar Jaenada, Angelo Jose, Lozano Corso, Jose Manual, Brett Cullen, Sedona Legge, Diego Espejel, Janelle Bailey and Stevan ‘Sully’ Seagull.
Writer: Anthony Jaswinski.
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra.

Rating: 4/5

One must swallow as much salty dramatic logic as Blake Lively does water to make The Shallows work, but work it does. Jaume Collet-Serra’s woman-vs-wild thriller is beautiful, bigscreen Hollywood nonsense that manoeuvres/manipulates the viewer into the kind of submissive state only the finest summer crowd-pleasers can achieve. Unlike Lively’s stranded surfer, who takes on a monster shark with guile and cunning, it’s best to jam any overthinking deep into your psychic beach bag and just enjoy the bounty of gut-level visceral thrills.

So grounded yet mesmerising as if to have risen out of the golden sand itself, Lively plays grieving med student Nancy, who has deferred her studies to travel to the idyllic beach that was dear to her late mom. The reconciliation with her mother’s spiritual home provides a mere shading of real world emotion yet, as sketchy a set-up as that may be, it is all Lively needs to spark the heroine into life. The actress’ innate sweetness and towering physicality proves a potent and photogenic combination. Not unlike her husband Ryan Reynold’s solo turn in Buried (2010; also for a Spanish director, Rodrigo Cortes), Lively maximises her time alone on-screen, her only companion a Wilson-like seagull, whom she names ‘Steven’ (the film’s biggest laugh).

Having taken to the azure waters, she spends the day riding the breaks that her mother once enjoyed. Collet-Serra takes his good time establishing ever-changing, sometimes disorienting nature of the seascape, from the pounding surf to the razor-sharp coral, but this is deliberate. Understanding the geography plays a crucial role in buying into Nancy’s developing predicament. The breathing space that the Lord Howe Island location gives his camera only amplifies his skill at forging tension. And the vastness of the sun-drenched tropical setting is matched only by the multitude of adoring angles the director and his DOP Flavio Martínez Labiano afford their leading lady.

Nancy’s decision to ride one last set is her undoing. A whale carcass has drifted near shore and she veers too near; from the depths, a great white shark checks her out. Soon, she is stranded on a rock that will be submerged come high tide; the shark is a constant presence, as is the threat of unconsciousness and infection associated with the gaping thigh wound she has suffered (if the production takes certain liberties with reality in most other regards, it gets the results of shark teeth on flesh right enough). Set in motion is a slasher pic structure, in which the ‘final girl’ must draw on reserve strength, both mental and physical, to outwit the ‘killing machine’ bad guy who has a myopic focus on carnage.

The Spanish director rarely lets reality usurp genre fun (House of Wax, 2005; Orphan, 2009; Unknown, 2011; Non-Stop, 2014). The Shallows is no different; both narratively (why are no other locals surfing this beach?) and scientifically (why is only one shark attracted to the whale carcass?), Collet-Serra brazenly, occasionally brilliantly, laughs in the face of common sense. He is concerned with cracking B-movie suspense, ratcheting up the thrills via (mostly) superb CGI employment and providing Lively with all the contrivances she needs to survive against her nemesis.

SCREEN-SPACE is adamantly against the demonization of sharks as movie monsters (read our interview with documentarian and shark protection advocate Madison Stewart). But The Shallow’s hulking villain is no more a realistic portrayal of the ocean’s great alpha predator than The Wizard of Oz is of tornadoes. His form and function is pure cinematic villainy; the dark chemistry he creates with his human co-star is perhaps the most realistic element in the film.