Another shark movie means another movie I have to see ASAP, and that's why I went into Great White with the hope of being easily entertained. I saw one trailer for it, saw that it was people stuck at sea being terrorised by a big shark, and figured it would definitely be worth a watch. It turns out that I was very wrong. Details are coming along shortly, but Great White is the worst big killer shark movie that I've seen in the past decade . . . well, not including the SyFy and straight-to-streaming creature features that are still churned out every month for viewers even less discerning than myself.
Things start with a couple having a pleasant swim beside their big boat, which is close to a small, isolated, island. Then a shark attacks. We then move on to our main characters, Kaz (Katrina Bowden) and Charlie (Aaron Jakubenko), a couple who work on chartered small flight experiences, with an employee named Benny (Te Kohe Tuhaka). They get offered a good payday to take a married couple, Joji (Tim Kano) and Michelle (Kimi Tsukakoshi), to a small, isolated, island for a nice day out. A corpse is soon found, and then the shark appears, attacking the seaplane and forcing the group to use the inflatable life-raft to try and get back to safety.
The first thing you may notice about Great White is the fact that none of the characters are easy to root for. Kano plays one of the most annoying people I've had to tolerate in film in the past few years, but Tuhaka is also fairly hard to like, mainly because of how quickly his character clashes with Kano's character. Bowden is a positive presence, although she can't do enough to lift this material, and Tsukakoshi is just fine, but Jakubenko is painfully lacking any real presence. That wouldn't be so bad if more characters were thrown in the mix, more people to be picked off by shark attacks, but it's a lot worse when there are only five people onscreen for most of the runtime.
The second thing you may notice here is the shockingly poor CGI when the seaplane gets attacked. Thankfully, most of the special effects are better than that, but it's not an impressive start to the shark action, and it makes you more aware of any other moments that fall short of the standard expected from a film made with a sheen of professionalism.
The third thing you will notice is how surprisingly boring this is for a movie about a shark stalking some floating prey. A lot of that is due to the weak script from writer Michael Boughen (this is only his second script), but director Martin Wilson, making his feature debut, makes things worse by not course-correcting at all when things start to drift aimlessly. And the exciting finale just a) feels a bit dumb, and b) reminds you of how you could have just rewatched The Shallows for a better film featuring a shark and limited cast numbers.
I don't expect every film with a great white shark in it to be Jaws (very few shark movies even come close to that greatness), but I do expect them to be entertaining. This had me hankering for the sheer silliness of 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, and that's saying something. A general level of competence easily saves it from being among the worst films I have seen, but it's definitely below average.
4/10
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