2008 thriller film, dir. Danny Lerner, Stephen Baldwin, Vanessa
Johansson: IMDb /
allmovie. A
shark is killing divers in Venice, but we can't let the word get out
or the tourists will be scared off. US vt Sharks in Venice.
The Jaws riffs are obvious – this is a Nu Image production, and
they make a new killer shark film every year or two – but so also are
the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade riffs. Our hero is pulled out
of the college lecture he's giving to be informed that his father's
gone missing while diving illegally, and of course he goes to Venice
to look for him (he never finds him). Unfortunately our hero is played
by Stephen Baldwin, whose tiny eyes and permanently smug expression
fail to engender any sort of sympathy as he goes up against
obstructive Venetian policemen. On his first dive, he casually locates
the "Medicci" [sic] treasure that everyone's looking for; he appears
to get his leg bitten off by the shark, but when he wakes up in
hospital it seems to be back where it was and nobody mentions it
again. His fiancée ("she's an expert in the mediæval period… she's
very smart"), played by Vanessa "no, Scarlett is my little sister"
Johansson, wanders along in his wake, trying to look as if she's got
something to do, until she is inevitably kidnapped by the villain.
The shark attacks are achieved by a mixture of stock footage, shaky
cam and red filters – and an occasional bit of digital compositing
when the shark leaps out of the water to eat a hapless Venetian. So
you're not getting anything like convincing gore. To distract you from
this, there are various pursuits and shoot-outs with the villain's
henchmen (including some on motorbikes, so practical in Venice), which
keep moving through the same sets shot from slightly different angles
with the extras rearranged. (The film was made in Bulgaria, where
extras are cheap, but not so cheap that we can have convincing crowd
scenes.) When one henchman picks up a chainsaw, our hero fights him
off with… a wooden chair. Uh-huh.
It eventually turns out that the villain has deliberately been
releasing the sharks to keep people away from the treasure… even
though the main thing they end up eating is his own henchmen as they
look for the treasure. The climactic scene is not, for the most part,
a shark fight, but an assault by the Venetian police on the villain's
lair – complete with gratuitously-repeated fast-roping.
Really the only good thing here is Hilda van der Meulen as one of the
Venetian police (and she didn't get another acting job for eight years
after this). It's complete rubbish, and great fun. Trailer
here.
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