Red Water (2003)

Sick Product of a Sick System

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Spoiler Alert! At least the shark doesn't growl like other stupid movies have to use to make the shark seem menacing! It seems like this film, Deep Blue Sea, Jaw 1 and 2 got it right. Bait was another decent film but it needed more character development I thought. This film however has fine buildup but the way they killed the shark was really weak. I was always a big fan of shark films when I was younger and I'd always rent this because it's the only other one besides the 4 others I mentioned that did really well. Lou Diamond Phillips does pretty well I must say. Bottom line the movie was pretty good up until the very end when they kill the shark.

Before viewing this movie, I was aware that it was a made for TV shark movie. I was aware of how bad it was going to be, and it reached my expectations.So basically the movie is this: Lou Diamond Philips, Kristy Swanson, Coolio, a random shark in a river and criminal treasure hunters. That's it. There isn't any explanation of why there was a shark in a river (which is scientifically impossible), there wasn't anything. The acting could have been done better with chimps as the lead roles, the shark is just a big rubber nothing, and criminal treasure hunters? Really? That's just making the movie even more ridiculous than it already is. They add nothing extra to the nonsensical story, they're basically there to be shark bait.To top off this mess of a movie, it's also predictable and horribly clichéd. If I'd known who the characters were before watching the movie then I could probably guess who dies and in what order. This is a movie that is trying to be Jaws but ends up being more like Tintoera.To put it bluntly, don't watch this movie.

Well, I supposed you could look at this as the umpteenth bad shark movie, but it's actually a little less bad than the previous umpteenth bad shark movie I saw. No, seriously, "Red Water" is not as bad as that Casper Van Diem "Shark Attack"-crap and its sequels. And as far as made for TV shark movies go, they at least did try to make something remotely decent here. Okay, it is a "Jaws"-clone, like any movie featuring a killer-shark (this time the shark's swimming up stream). But it feels more along the lines of "Anaconda" (1997) or "Lake Placid" (1999). Only, slightly below those standards. There were at least two events in "Red Water" that had me really rolling my eyes. Won't go into them, not really worth it. I did have some laughs with Coolio as a bad-ass *beep* with a gun. And how they kill the shark, you just have to see! I loved it! Most of the time the shark looked surprisingly okay even. I said: "most of the time" not "all the time". In some sequences they even appeared to have used a mechanical shark, which is always applaudable in these days of (crappy) CGI (though the latter is featured too, on some occasions). Anyway, I didn't mind this as a time-waster. Like I said, I've seen far worse shark tripe already.

What's with all these stupid but fancy looking made-for-TV shark movies these days? Only a couple weeks ago, I watched something awful called "Spring Break Shark Attack" in which a troop of sharks eat some college bikinis, and here's another one already, this time set in the swamps and revolving on a bull shark. Well, at least "Red Water" is slightly better than the aforementioned "Spring Break" but of course still a long way from being a good shark-thriller. Two crews of people navigate their boats down the extensive swamps of Louisiana. One crew (with Kirsty Swanson and Lou Diamond Philips on board) is on their way to drill oil, the other crew are villains (with rapper Coolio among them) looking for a lost treasure on the bottom of a lake, but all they encounter is an extremely hungry bull shark. It's rather dangerous to swim with him around, so the bad guys take the good guys (and girl) hostage and command them to dive for the money. "Red Water" features one or two well-staged action sequences and the bull shark is an interesting choice of water monster (finally something different than the Great White or Tiger Shark), but overall it's a forgettable thriller with weak performances from a washed up cast. There's no tension, a minimum of bloodshed and the underwater footage only shows brief images of a fake computer-engineered shark. The lovely Mrs. Swanson doesn't even wear on a colorful bikini, for Christ's sake, so why are we still talking about it?