Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.There is only one definitive shark movie: Jaws. All others (Open Water, Blood Surf, Deep Blue Sea) are just pretenders to the aquatic throne. You can cheese it up (Megalodon), confuse it up (Cyclone), or straight out copy it (insert name of foreign rip-off here) and you still can't better Steven Spielberg's original Summer blockbuster. Luckily, something like Shark Night 3D doesn't even try. Instead, it goes for a more semi-schlock oriented approach to underwater horror. Sadly, the decision to go PG-13, and the lack of a significant sense of its inherent strengths, all but destroys any potential fun. With Finals rapidly winding down, a group of students from Tulane University decide to head out to a nearby Louisiana lake and participate in a little drunken R&R. They include conveniently pre-med Nick (Dustin Milligan), bad girl Beth (Katherine McPhee), gamer geek Gordon (Joel David Moore), football star Maliki (Sinqua Walls), his soon to be fiancé Maya (Alyssa Diaz), male model type Blake (Chris Zylka) and the owner of the island pad, rich misunderstood ice queen Sara (Sara Paxton).
Arriving in the adjoining small town, they run into the local rube sheriff (Donal Logue) and rude hicks Red (Joshua Leonard) and Dennis (Chris Carmack). They also discover that the waters are somehow filled with multiple man-eating sharks. Soon, it becomes readily apparent that someone is using these underwater killers as fodder for a fiendish plot - with our undergrads as the less than enthusiastic bait.
Shark Night 3D is such a disappointment. At least the last time we saw partying teens being attacked by evil fishies, it was in service of the slyly subversive and satiric Piranha 3D. There, director Alexandre Aja understood that nothing spells mindless exploitative entertainment better than an abundance of B's - babes, breasts, blood, buffoons, and beasts. The result was a jokey genre mash-up where lewdness and laughter went hand in severed hand. In this case, however, director David R. Ellis must have been under strict orders to make the MPAA happy. There's no gore, no naked women (we do get to see Chris Zylka's butt, if that's any consolation), and definitely no excitement. It's as if someone decided to make a shark attack movie and then restricted themselves to avoid splatter almost all together. Boo!
Besides, who begins by blatantly ripping off Spielberg and thinks they can get away with it? The script, by Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg starts out with a couple getting frisky in the water. He swims away, she stays around, and the next thing you know, our victim is doing a lame Susan Backlinie imitation. As she swirls around in the surf, bits of pint foam indicating the carnage going on beneath the surface, you'd swear it was 1975 all over again. You'd also swear that had Jaws been this way, that new kid Steve...Someone would never have gotten a second job.
Indeed, all throughout Shark Night 3D is a sense that Ellis doesn't know what he's doing. Give him some Snakes on a Plane or a Final Destination or 2 and he's more than capable. But with the underwater footage (confused and muddied by the inclusion of the unnecessary 3D), the kills are crappy. We don't come to a nature gone wild movie to hear boring backstory and crudely drawn character traits. Shark Night 3D overdoses on these while keeping the body parts and bobbing torsos to a bare (if clothed) minimum.
When we finally hear the reason behind the appearance of these uncommon critters, when the motive for the wild wicked waterworks is made clear, Shark Night 3D finds a brief moment of goofy charm. The rest of the time, this is subpar SyFy Channel chum.
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