SHARK ATTACK 2 (2000)
Tagline: In the Deep Blue Sea There Lives a Dark Secret
(Action, Adventure, Genetically Mutated Sharks That Look Like Regular Sharks) [R]
I’ll see you guys later, let me have the spear gun.
In this installment in the SHARK ATTACK series we are taken to Cape Town, South Africa, Samantha Peterson’s sister is attacked and killed by a shark and eventually realizes it’s the same shark on display at a nearby aquarium. When she goes to literally shoot the shark, she is stopped by Dr. Nick Harris. A day later after attacking and killing one of the staff, the shark escapes. Only that isn’t the only problem. There is a whole cave off the coast that is home to several mutated sharks with a thirst for blood.
This thing is essentially a mishmash of blenderized (I know that’s not a word) DEEP BLUE SEA, JAWS 3D, and JAWS. We have a mayor that won’t cancel a surf competition because of a surf competition. We have a large aquarium attraction like Sea World that wants to try and keep a great white captive. We have genetically mutated sharks for the second time now in this series which very much echoes the DEEP BLUE SEA films.
I thought the acting for the first 30 minutes of the film was actually fine. Then for some reason when asked to show any emotion, everyone just kind of forgets what acting is and we get a lot of really lame scenes that I think could have worked with a better cast. Thorsten Kaye who plays Dr. Nick Harris is probably a decent actor (he’s done a ton of notable TV work), but an A-lister could have pulled this off. The script isn’t that bad. Nikita Ager (COOTIES) is fine in about half of this, then like Kaye, she just falls off the cliff. I have no doubt that she is also better in other things because she does show flashes of good acting in this thing. Wrapping up the main cast we get Dan Metcalfe (KICKING & SCREAMING) who plays kind of a Steve Irwin-type character that just wants to capture himself killing a shark for his TV show. I found him to be fine as the film moved along as a character, but the acting didn’t improve.
This installment in the series was filmed back to back with SHARK ATTACK. I guess I am in the minority when it comes to SHARK ATTACK. I actually thought that film was pretty solid. It might have just been because I was looking at it in a field of terrible shark films and saying to myself…” Okay, that one is tolerable”, but I actually thought this movie was entertaining enough even knowing that it was borrowing from other films. It doesn’t feel slow. This thing moves right along and I didn’t find myself hoping it would just be over at any point. Where this thing gets janky is in the parts where they show above shots of the shark where they didn’t have a real one. The fake rig is just really toy-like. It looks like a fairly mid-sized shark model and you never want that. Steven Spielberg and his team should never be able to make a better shark than some making a shark film a quarter century after that. If you had the budget of a Polonia Brothers film, then I forgive you, but this thing was able to obtain plenty of great shark footage and I would really have liked to have seen them pull at least those shots where you are looking down at the shark in the water off.
The score was okay, but there is nothing iconic going on. We don’t get scenes where you feel like they are building up to something. The love story is just okay. I don’t think they needed to leave it out, but I think a few more heartfelt conversations between our two love birds would have made this thing pop a little on an emotional level. Instead, I really didn’t care about any of the characters as much as I wanted to. The setup for Samantha would have lent itself perfectly to that.
Overall I thought this was more fun than the first film in the series, but I still can’t give it a 5. There are better shark flicks out there, but this is not anywhere near the worst.
SHARK ATTACK gets a 4 out of 7.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF MILLENIUM FILMS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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