Film Brain reviews a shark film that managed to get surviving Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss to do an extended cameo for them - okay, not that big a challenge these days, but still...
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00:00Scout Taylor Compton has to choose between sharks in the water and pirates on the surface in the thriller Into the Deep.
00:06When she was a girl, Taylor Compton saw her father eaten by a shark.
00:10Now she's going to face her fears by going on a treasure dive with husband Callum McGowan on Stuart Townsend's boat.
00:17When they're attacked by Great Whites, they try and get help only to bring aboard John Cedar's band of pirates
00:22who want to salvage a shipment of their own.
00:25Probably the most notable thing about this direct-to-video shark movie is that it managed to get Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss in to play Taylor Compton's grandfather.
00:33Presumably when they offered him the check, they told him,
00:36You're gonna need a bigger retirement boat.
00:39Okay, I kid. Dreyfuss definitely isn't fighting any sharks here,
00:42but he actually brings some surprising gravitas to the role as he encourages his granddaughter to work through her trauma,
00:48but also follow in his footsteps to become an oceanographer, another nod to his role in the Spielberg classic.
00:54The film is directed by Christian Sesma, who has done a whole bunch of direct-to-video actioners.
00:59He previously worked with Dreyfuss on every last one of them,
01:02and this is mostly a familiar premise, but competently handled.
01:05That still makes it a chomp above most low-budget shark flicks because that's a very low bar.
01:11It's basically a cheapie version of Paul Walker's Into the Blue,
01:14and by extension, the movie that was copying, The Deep.
01:17Wait a minute, did they just get the title for this movie by just smashing those two films together?
01:23That's not actually an outlandish possibility.
01:25What really lets the film down is the absolutely terrible CGI,
01:29especially with the sharks and digital blood,
01:31which especially stand out because of the high quality of the diving footage,
01:35and then you'll get a shark straight out of a PlayStation 2 game.
01:38The CG sharks in this actually look worse than they did in Deep Blue Sea,
01:42which came out 25 years ago, and they didn't even look good then.
01:46The film also has a long monologue by Dreyfuss out of character during the credits,
01:50encouraging viewers to donate towards shark conservation.
01:53That's very well-intentioned, but it's quite jarring at the end of a movie like this,
01:57where aside from one key moment near the end,
01:59sharks are depicted as being mindless eating machines that attack on sight.
02:03It might be an attempt to restore the damage that films like Jaws and its emulators
02:07have done to the reputation of sharks, but it's kind of like having your chum and eating it.