Mark Reviews Movies: GREAT WHITE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 15, 2021

The shark or, in this case, sharks in a thriller about the carnivorous fish matter less than the humans within that story. This should be obvious, but it's fascinating how few movies to feature sharks hunting humans and humans trying to evade sharks really understand that idea. Great White kind of gets it but, also, misses a much more important point.

The humans here do matter more than the sharks, until the climax, when it's mostly about a fewer number of characters trying to outwit and fight off a pair of the aquatic beasts. Those people and their respective dramas, though, are just, to put it bluntly, pretty dull.

That fact becomes unavoidable, because the screenplay by Michael Boughen puts the human characters and their various conflicts at the fore, simply by way of the story's eventually revealed premise. Basically, a group of five people, having an unfortunate encounter with a shark during an escapade to a remote island, become stranded in the ocean on an inflatable life raft. They have to survive, not only the elements and the occasional shark attack, but also each other.

In retrospect, this is a pretty clever setup, and with the right characters and the right kind of conflict, someone else might be able to make a decent thriller out of the basics of Boughen's premise. In case it isn't clear, that hypothetical movie isn't this one.

Instead, we're stuck with characters of various degrees of irritating, not only because their development is so transparently thin and their squabbles are so mild, but also because they so frequently allow those little spats get in the way of the bigger picture of surviving. Might we believe that a jealous man, seeing his wife receiving attention from another man, get a bit upset with said guy? Of course, we would.

Should we believe that the jealous man, stuck in a rather delicate life raft in the middle of the ocean with a man-eating shark stalking the boat, put himself, the other guy, his wife, and two other people in jeopardy, by trying to get into a violent brawl with the other guy? We could under certain narrative circumstances, but without the proper establishment and development of the characters and the conflict, it just looks as if a screenwriter is offering up a cheap excuse to get the shark involved again.

There's far too much of that in director Martin Wilson's movie for us to believe this situation or care about the people in it. Those people, by the way, are two married couples—Kaz (Katrina Bowden) and Charlie (Aaron Jakubenko), who run an independent seaplane business for tourists, and Michelle (Kimie Tsukakoshi) and Joji (Tim Kano), who want to take a day trip to an atoll nicknamed Hell's Reef—and Benny (Te Kohe Tuhaka), the small business owners' friend and company cook. While sightseeing (Michelle is also trying to distribute her father's ashes at the sight of a shipwreck that gave the reef its nickname, but like all the back story here, it means little), the quintet discovers the remains of a man who was attacked by a shark (A prologue shows that and gives away most of the movie's tricks, in terms of building tension and the payoff).

Believing that the victim's girlfriend may have survived and could be stranded at sea, the five go looking for the couple's boat. They find it, but the shark that killed the couple attacks the plane. All five of them end up in a life raft, hoping the current will carry them to land.

What follows, then, is a lot of in-fighting (Joji doesn't take too kindly to being ordered around or having Benny's completely uninterested eyes on Michelle) and a couple of excuses for someone to jump or be knocked into the water (a dropped paddle, the aforementioned fight, and a shark ramming the raft for no particular reason). Without much to know about these characters (Kaz is pregnant, and Charlie, conveniently a former marine biologist, has flashes of trauma from a previous shark attack), a lot of the story on the raft is filled with downtime, waiting for Boughen to contrive a rationale for suspense (someone quietly and slowly swimming in the water, until an exposed dorsal fin appears) or a character to be attacked.

The climax, in which the surviving humans actually fight the sharks, does provide some over-the-top energy to Great White. It's too little and too late, while still missing the point of why we should care about this story.

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