NEEDED A BIGGER BOAT
"What your dealing with is a shark". Summer bummer. Sharks don't swim in fresh water but in 2022's Bull Shark, they do. Well of course they do. Otherwise there'd be no movie.
Bull Shark runs an hour and twenty minutes and that's with commercials. Yeah it's compact and passed over as they come. I mean if you blink a couple of times you might miss the darn thing. I'm not just talking about the film's runtime, I'm talking about the key shark attacks which edit out ever so quickly.
So OK, I can't recommend Bull Shark even if I tried. But I can say that it surprised me. I mean I thought it would be a B-movie with a bunch of dumb teenagers getting in a boat and being slaughtered by a big-boned marine fish. Bite my tongue. Bull Shark is more a drama than a shark flick or anything else. Director Brett Bentman tries his utmost to make the viewer forget that cut-rate inkling.
Bull Shark as a film, succeeds on land but fails miserably at sea (I mean lake). Its story about an alcoholic, Texas game warden who with his family falling apart, tries to dispatch a hungry shark is not half-bad. It's really not.
Bentman's pic from a dramatic standpoint, is well-plotted, tension-building, and nearly atmospheric in its approach. The problem arises when Bull Shark has other scenes involving people in water, people in boats, and shark kills in general. Is the shark (or sharks) in Bull Shark fake? Heck yeah they are. All you gotta do is look at the fins. When local denizens get offed by the shark are the ambushes a product of a quick-cut, editing faux pas? Oh you betcha. It's almost laughable.
All in all, I liked Bentman's direction in Bull Shark (mostly the overhead shots) and I kinda dug the cinematography (Texas almost looked like my home state of Michigan). If only Bull Shark had the gumption to have a special effects supervisor on board or even a budget for special effects. For me this is mixed, cock and "bull".
Written by Jesse Burleson
No comments:
Post a Comment