Deep Blue Sea 3 (Review)
Well, where do I even begin, I guess I'll start off by saying I was a big fan of the original growing up and I never even took the time out of my day to even watch 2, but that being said, I wasn't a movie reviewer back then and we of course didn't have a pandemic SEVERELY limiting our choices for movies those days either, but could it do the unthinkable and be the much welcomed surprise of the year? Well, let's see shall we.
Will keep it simple and start off with the positives, the Bull Sharks are pack hunters in this one, in a more serious in tone movie I would probably roll my eyes, but for a movie that shouldn't aim to take itself too seriously it's a fun concept that these Bull Sharks are just ganging up on people.
The underwater scenes are shot well enough, they give off a very dark and gloomy atmosphere that in any other movie would probably prove to build a lot of suspense, not being able to see what's literally 5 feet out in front of you as you gander out into an endless abyss is all apart of what makes Sharks so scary in the first place, the threat of not knowing your surroundings and that anything can pop out anywhere at anytime is a really scary dynamic about the ocean and they encapsulated that well enough in the underwater scenes.
Anddddddd, that's about it! If you noticed even the two positives have flaws, in the last positive I used the statement "in any other movie would probably prove to build a lot of suspense" cause as good as the underwater shots by themselves look at times they LITERALLY do nothing with it.
In my initial positive I said "a movie that SHOULDN'T aim to take itself too seriously" well, I say "shouldn't" cause there is just not enough fun going on here, the movie can't seem to decide whether it wants to play itself serious or not take itself too serious like it probably should, so in the end we end up with a muddled disjointed feeling movie that I can't imagine pleases anybody, pick a side, cause chances are if you're trying to appease everyone you end up pleasing nobody.
Now I will give this mixed point if you will, part of me appreciated that they took some time to try to show some comradery between the characters and a bit of exposition even before the carnage starts, but on the other hand we don't have anywhere near the caliber of actors to not bore you to tears before the carnage ensues, this is where being self aware is very crucial and this is what is mostly missing from this movie if I had to say one thing.
As far as characters I liked LITERALLY nobody, I noticed the girl from Texas Chainsaw 3D instantly, but I might have disliked her character in this even more than I did in 3D and I didn't think that was possible going in, nothing about her felt like I could root for her, they did give her the cliche "we're the evil ones not the Sharks!" Routine, but instead of being like oh! What a caring individual! We begin to roll our eyes, like we get it! You love sharks! We are so invested in your character now! Thanks! The rest of the cast was one big bleh moment, they also had this guy in it that looked like the great value brand version of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and he fit every stereotype known to man, so much so that I announced something about his character that would undoubtedly happen that I should have no right in knowing and when it happened I literally laughed out loud.
The acting in general is bad, but it's not like that so bad that it's good kind of bad, if you're a big Horror fan like I am, you know exactly what I mean, if you're not, trust me such a thing exists, but it however does not exist in this movie.
Then there's the one liners in this movie, again kind of falling in line with the so bad that it's good thing, a good reference point would be the terrible one liners from late 80's/90's action movies that we still for whatever reason unabashedly love, this movie has one liners that are bad, but not like we can laugh at them bad, more like my whole body is cringing bad.
Then there's of course the couple fight scenes we get, we got a dude doing like 360 spin kicks like he's the Muscle from Brussels himself, Jean Claude Van Damme for Christ sakes and I just don't buy any of it, now if this movie would have been more self aware like I was saying this kind of thing would have favored better, but I'm just kind of stuck in between like are they serious with this right now? You can't have an inconsistent formula and I do not have swaying feelings of not knowing where I stand on stuff like this, some people can pull this thing off, but this all over the place kind of mood in the hands of a "B Movie" for all intents and purposes typically spells disaster.
I'd have to say the Shark kills are the only thing that play into that self aware ridiculous nature I wish this movie aimed for more, but that is only cause they were so over the top there was zero hiding what their motivations behind those kills were, but again I couldn't enjoy them like I wanted to because they feel weird placed against a movie that feels like they're trying to make this serious film in spots as well.
The effects are as expected pretty bad here, I'll give it to them that they probably had a very low budget for this, but there seemed to be no effort in the creativity side of things where you could mask that a bit.
The 100 minute run time I will say didn't necessarily drag so I guess that's a plus, but a straight to DVD 3rd installment of Deep Blue Sea probably benefits with a straight to the point approach and settles in at a sweet spot at 80-90 mins max for better results.
In conclusion, I wanted to be surprised, I really did, I was told this was a great improvement over Deep Blue Sea 2 by some people, which makes me all the happier it never graced my eyeballs, cause if this was this bad, just how bad is Deep Blue Sea 2?!?! That's scarier to think about than anything in this movie.
In the end Deep Blue Sea 3 is everything that's wrong with shark movies post-jaws, not well done enough to really pull us into the story and everything it's going for and not self aware enough to bring out the so bad it's good qualities that a lot of us Horror fans actually crave, instead it's somewhere in the middle of all that and not worthy of your time unfortunately.
1/5 Stars