Bait (2012)

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I just had to give this film a go after reading the ridiculous synopsis. However, it was not as bad as I expected. It is full of character clichés and obvious plot developments but it's still actually quite watchable. The acting is OK, no mind blowing performances here. A couple of known faces turn up in form of Julian McMahon (Fantastic 4) and Alex Russel (Chronicle) but the rest of the cast are relatively unknown other than the fact that everyone seems to have been in Home and Away at some point. The film moves at a steady pace and does have some tense scenes and some wonderfully gruesome deaths...but mostly this is just B movie tat without the sense of humour that usually comes with that genre. The films also loses points for some truly shocking CGI when it comes to the tsunami and indeed the sharks. Still...I watched till the end.

"Bait" is a bad shark movie without enough ridiculous moments to become entertaining for that badness. When those moments come, they are pretty darn ridiculous, but not laughably so, for example:the movie opens with a shark attack that is perhaps the least realistic or frightening example of such a scene since the rubber shark in that '60s Batman movie. The standard doesn't improve much from here.the movie involves a tsunami that leaves people stranded in a flooded supermarket, stuck on top of shelves to keep out of the water, and stuck inside their cars in a parking garage. When the flood hits the garage the cars are completely submerged, and yet the people within them remain dry. When they got those cars, did they pay extra for submarines too?in what is still probably the movie's best scene, a heroic Asian man suits up in a makeshift diver's costume, weighing himself down with cans of food taped to his legs, and protecting himself from shark attacks with metal cages over his body. Most improbable yet, he has a snorkel he can use with a long hose allowing him to breathe underwater. Apparently they just found all this stuff floating around. If you were in a flooded supermarket and had to take shelter on top of a shelf, exactly how much diving equipment do you think you would find out of sheer luck?The movie quickly gets boring and derivative, up until the sharks, for there are actually two I believe, are dispatched in equally ridiculous ways: an underwater shotgun blast for one, a taser electrocution for the other. Tasers are designed to incapacitate people, and yet they can kill great whites? And shotguns work under water?

A group of people who get trapped in a Supermarket after a Tsunami hits the coast of Queensland, Australia. But they soon find out that they have more to worry about than being in a flooded grocery store, there's a 12 foot badly CG shark swimming around them, and it's hungry.It's a high concept movie for sure, a group of people stuck in a shop with a hungry shark, and as concepts go, it's a pretty bonkers one for sure.And like Snakes On A Plane, it more or less does what it says on the tin, it should have been called Sharks In A Shark, but I'm sure some suit in the studio would think that people wouldn't then take the film seriously. And we want to take a film with this concept seriously......So we have some relatively famous faces, and some culturally friendly (for the overseas market) characters standing on shelving trying to survive. Every now and again, someone who you haven't see in a film before tries to escape, it looks like they are going to make it, but guess what? Exactly.......It's like a mini version of The Poseidon Adventure, minus major character arcs and drama, but it has all the ingredients of a disaster movie.The cast are fine, but you can guess who will make it, and who will lose bodily parts, it's pretty perfunctory in that way.My advice is, watch it in 2D, because it's hilarious to see things approach the screen with the 3D as a primary marketing ploy, rather than story.Still fun though.

Mixed bag, but better than expected.Almost switched off at first sight of the daft CGI shark, but we stuck with it.So a group of conflicted characters is trapped in a shop with a couple of man-eating sharks driven in by a tsunami. As the characters try to figure out an escape their conflicts are resolved, and they co-operate to save the day.The characters are so-so, and too many of them survive. The idea of the lower level car park not filling up with water is wrong. And I think they should have had one shark down below, with the water upstairs filled with loads of nasty little creatures that Australia is notorious for. Or just lots of small sharks, like in Open Water.The references to Jaws were enjoyable, and the time passed OK.