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Synopsis: On the
Atchafalaya River, Louisiana, the young Andre Gautreaux (Nicholas
Andrews) and his grandfather (Clive Scott) head for the Black Cove to do
some fishing. To their astonishment, the two find an oil-rig operating
there, and turn back down the river. The workers on the rig set off an
underwater explosion. Beneath the waters, a large bull shark is slightly
injured by the blast, and leaves the isolated area. At Lake Verret, two
teenage girls swim a race to a floating platform. One of them screams
hysterically as a fin breaks the surface. Panicked swimmers stampede for
land, while the two girls head desperately for the platform. One of them
makes it – and one of them does not…. John Sanders (Lou Diamond
Phillips), the owner of a charter fishing-boat, learns from his bank
that if he misses one more loan payment, his boat will be repossessed.
Diver Brett Vanrooyen (Langley
Kirkwood) and criminal associate Ice (Coolio) are sent after the
newly-released Jerry Cullen (Jaimz Woolvett), who five years earlier hid
$3 million in drug money in the Atchafalaya
River before being arrested. Meanwhile, the Gautreaux’ fishing
expedition is not going well. As Grandpa ponders the lack of fish, a
violent pull on his line tips him into the water. The embarrassed
fisherman struggles back to his boat – only to vanish in an eruption of
blood. Some time later, a small boat nudges John Sanders’ vessel, the
“Bitter End”. The outside of the bateau is splashed with blood; inside,
a boy lies almost catatonic. Sheriff Dale Landry (Dennis Haskins) has
the boy taken care of, then tells John that he is headed to Lake Verret
to investigate a reported shark attack. John is incredulous, but his
right-hand man, Emery Broussard (Rob Boltin), insists that that a bull
shark could be responsible. As the sheriff pulls away, John sees to his
dismay that he has another visitor: his ex-wife, Dr Kelli Raymond
(Kristy Swanson). With Kelli is Gene Bradley (Gideon Emery), an
executive at Discovery Petroleum, the company for which she works as an
environmental biologist – and for which John used to work as a driller.
John learns that the company believes that there is a massive oil
deposit under the Black Cove and that, in spite of the area’s wildlife
refuge status, it has managed to obtain a drilling lease. Kelli adds
that the operation has hit trouble, and the company needs John back
doing his previous job; a job he quit after a fatal blowout for which he
still holds himself responsible. When Kelli tries to assure him that the
accident was not his fault, John angrily orders her off his boat.
Further down the marina, Jerry Cullen is preparing to cast off when he
is jumped by Brett and Ice, who “persuade” him to take them to the
missing money. Later that night, John relates his history to Emery, who
advises him to take the second chance that he has been offered – which
John finally, reluctantly, decides to do. The “Bitter End” encounters
Sheriff Landry, who tells John that there have now been two fatalities,
that a large bounty has been placed on the shark, and that the area
upriver has been closed. John argues that the pattern of attacks
suggests that the shark is headed downriver, and Landry agrees to let
him pass. On a nearby boat, one of those hunting the shark tries out his
harpoon equipment. The projectile cuts through the water, missing the
unseen bull shark by inches. Having been headed towards the Gulf, the
animal turns and swims back upriver….
Comments: I
would like to know, very much like to know, just what Public Relations
firm Carcharhinus leucas employs in order to keep its profile so
enduringly low. Here’s a test: when discussing sharks with your average
specimen of Homo sapiens, say great white or tiger
or mako; you’ll probably get a reaction. Conversely, say bull
shark (and believe me, I say “bull shark” a lot: it’s one of my
favourite mixed-company pseudo-obscenities), and generally all you’ll
get is a blank look. And yet the bull is probably the species of shark
responsible for the greatest number of attacks upon humans; certainly, a
large proportion of attacks credited (is that the right word?) to the
great white are actually carried out by the bull; and as I write this,
the past week has seen two attacks by bulls upon teenagers in the waters
off Florida, one of them fatal. There is no great mystery about the
frequency of these human-shark encounters: the bull shark is simply, by
far, the species most likely to be where we are. Not only do these
animals inhabit those shallow coastal waters favoured for human
recreation, but alone of their kind, they have the ability to
osmoregulate – meaning that they can survive for extended periods in
fresh water…. I’ve read reviews of Red Water that scoffed at
the notion of a shark inhabiting the Louisiana bayou. Not only can
they do so, they do do so: last year, a six-foot specimen was
accidentally netted almost exactly where this film is set. Bull sharks
have been found as far up the Mississippi as Illinois – and almost twice
that distance up the Amazon. They swarm in the Ganges, for reasons I
won’t get into here. All around Australia, the river systems are full of
them, as are the man-made canals around the Gold Coast. Towards the end
of last year, a racehorse exercising in the Brisbane River was pulled
under by a bull shark; it survived, but it wasn’t feeling so racy
afterwards. There are bull sharks in St Lucia Lake in South Africa,
which is known for its high salt concentration. And there are bull
sharks in the wholly freshwater Lake Nicaragua. These apparently
isolated specimens were at one time considered to be a separate
sub-species – until a tagging experiment demonstrated that the damn
things could migrate like salmon. Bull sharks are complex, fascinating,
dangerous animals – and yet somehow they fail to grip the human
imagination, continue to fly under the human radar. Why is that?
Is it just that they don’t have the – the glamour of their more
notorious (and maligned) cousins? Is it that their name, “bull shark”,
is, well, kind of boring? Or is it that….that no-one has ever made a
film about them…?
I’ve got to be
honest about this: I was so pleased that at long last, someone
had finally recognised the menace value of the bull shark, that I came
to Red Water entirely predisposed in its favour, fully determined
to cut this otherwise unpromising made-for-TV entry in the killer shark
genre as much slack as I possibly could.
But of course, when
I start a review by announcing that I was pre-determined to cut a film
plenty of slack, that does rather imply that the film was in need
of the cutting – n’est-ce pas?
The killer shark
film, like many other things in life, exists on a bell curve. As is
certainly not the case with every film genre, there has been one truly
great shark film; it would probably be unrealistic of us ever to expect
another one. For the rest, there have been a couple of good shark films,
and a few –
Shark Zone, for instance – that can make genuine B-Movie buffs
fall to their knees and weep tears of gratitude. The bulk of them, alas,
are simply mediocre – and in spite of my desire to do otherwise, it is
into this category that I must consign Red Water. The problem is
not merely that the film is mediocre, but rather that it is mediocre in
a really exasperating way. It keeps looking like it’s about to do
something a bit better, something a bit different; but every time one of
these moments crops up, the film, as if frightened by its own audacity,
immediately retreats into cliché. Still, there are certainly many worse
killer shark films out there than Red Water; and in the spirit
with which I undertook this review, I will first highlight what I did
like about it.
One of Red Water’s
main strengths is its setting. Transplanting a killer shark story into
the rivers and bayous of Louisiana lends a nice degree of unfamiliarity
to the action, and there is a lot of rather lovely location footage
right throughout the film, which has the virtue of having being shot
almost entirely on location. (Not, however, in Louisiana.
Bizarrely, Red Water was shot in South Africa – a production
decision that I’m sure made perfect sense to the Sony executives while
they were polishing off that third bottle.) The shark effects themselves
are, as always, a mixed bag. The film is notable for the absence of
stock footage, with which most of these recent low-budget outings have
padded out their effects. (Not a problem in and of itself, perhaps –
except for the tendency to use footage of the wrong species!!)
The CGI scenes, with perhaps one exception, are pretty dire; and the
very first shot of the shark is one of the worst in the film. However,
these effects are supplemented by the use of a free-swimming animatronic
shark that is actually reasonably good. (Although its snout isn’t the
correct shape; for some reason, they never seem to get that right.) This
allows for both interaction between the shark and the cast (although the
scene in which John Sanders gets grabbed by his air-tank is pretty damn
silly) and for lots of close-up glide-past-the-camera moments; while, at
least when seen from above the water, the creature is both menacing and
graceful. Then, too, although it’s a fair size, the shark isn’t
outrageously big; certainly not as comically over-sized as, say, the
sharks in the Jaws sequels came to be. (Real bull sharks can get
up to about twelve feet, but generally don’t.) One nice detail is that
the first attack scene features the victim being pushed vertically out
of the water, something that does actually happen in bull shark attacks;
although whether this was intended to be a point of accuracy or merely a
shock moment is moot. The fact that the film’s action is supposed to be
in the bayou helps its execution, since the murky waters both add some
suspense to the attack scenes, and – more importantly – disguise the
deficiencies of the model; although they do finally succumb to
temptation and give us far too good a look at it.
A standard
complaint against killer shark films is that you don’t get enough shark
action. This is actually more of a commentary on the nature of these
films in general than you might realise. The shark in Jaws isn’t
on display all that much either, minute for minute….but for some reason,
people don’t seem to notice it. In fact, this phenomenon has led me
formulate the following Rule Of Film:
Ø
A good killer shark
film is one in which you don’t notice how little screentime the shark(s)
gets; a bad killer shark film is one where you do nothing but
notice; a terrible killer shark film is one where it really
doesn’t matter#.
(#The
exception to this – there’s always one, isn’t there? – is the
aforementioned Shark Zone, which almost compensates for its many,
many, many cinematic shortcomings with a body count so
ludicrously high, it feels as if the film were single-handedly trying to
make up for this common deficiency amongst its brethren.)
In this, as in so
much, Red Water lands squarely in the middle of the road – to be
fair, probably because of a need to deploy its effects budget with care.
Hence, the film opens with a few establishing shots of the shark, adds a
couple of discreetly rendered attack sequences (this was made-for-TV, so
these are the blood-in-the-water kind, not the twitching-severed-limb
kind), then has the shark step aside to allow the film’s subsidiary plot
to occupy the middle section of the story. He’s back for the final
twenty minutes or so, though, and gets to chomp his way through a fair
percentage of the cast. One thing I do like about Red Water is
that it junks almost all of those flogged-to-death Jaws
re-workings. There’s no “event” interrupted by the shark’s presence.
There’s no venal politician authorising a cover-up or refusing to close
the river (he doesn’t have to: people just sensibly stay the hell out of
the water). There’s no lone wolf hero unable to convince others of the
shark’s existence. There’s no Little Shark©. The
bounty-hunting moron brigade does put in appearance, granted, but
I’m prepared to call that a sad reality rather than a cliché; and in any
case, none of the hunters suffer any punishment for their behaviour; not
even the one who unknowingly sends the shark back upriver.
However….
The cumulative
good-will generated by Red Water’s conscientious attempts not
to copy the granddaddy of ’em all is completely blown out of the water
by a short scene of such surpassing stupidity, it literally made me
clutch my hair and cry out in pain.
John Sanders
encounters Sheriff Landry, who tells him that there is a report of a
shark attack in Lake Verret. John’s reaction is an exaggerated eyebrow
lift, while the sheriff goes on to insist that such a thing simply
couldn’t be, as sharks are found only in salt water; an opinion
with which John concurs. It takes John’s Cajun offsider, Emery (who is,
by definition, Wise In The Ways Of Nature), to clue the other two in on
the fact that a bull shark could be responsible – which comes as a great
surprise to them both. “Well – you learn something new every day!”
observes the sheriff, while John turns on Emery with a slightly
sceptical, “Bull shark, huh?”
Okay. I do realise
that this is the “educate the ignorant viewer” scene; BUT---
John is a
fisherman. His father was a fisherman. He grew up in
this area. AND HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A BULL SHARK IS!!?? And then there’s
Sheriff Landry of the Basin Police who, as far as we see, spends most of
his time patrolling these waters. AND HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A BULL SHARK
IS!!??
Gimme a break.
(And this is all
the more infuriating because they could have had John and/or Emery – or
better yet, Kelli – explaining bull sharks to Gene Bradley a bit later:
his ignorance I could accept.)
If Red Water
avoids many of the usual shark film clichés, it lays on almost every
other kind with a disheartening enthusiasm. We got the estranged couple
reunited by danger. We got the Hero With A Tragic Past. We got the
eee-vil business executive who gets his comeuppance. We got
“colourful” local people who turn on a “colourful” local festival at the
drop of a hat. We got an individual Colourful Person who has a Colourful
Accent and a saint for every occasion, and who gets to talk about God a
lot. We got a Wise Old Man who declares the shark to be a legendary
spirit known as “Le Gardien De L’Anse Noir”. And above all, we
got a shark that – except for the one obligatory pathos-death – is
perfectly capable of telling the Good Guys from the Bad Guys. The
frustrating thing, as I indicated earlier, is that there is some
attempt made occasionally to twist these standards in slightly different
directions. There comes a moment when John makes a self-righteous speech
about Kelli working for an oil company, in spite of her “scientific
principles”; but the script makes it clear that that’s what she was
doing when John – who also used to work for the same company –
met her, fell in love with her, and married her. In other words – John’s
just being a jerk. Red Water starts out looking like a
Seagal-esque Big Business Is Evil film (Discovery Petroleum gets its
lease by “tacking it onto an appropriations bill, and slipping it
through Congress”), but the oil exploration subplot never really takes
hold, despite the mutterings about human greed and retribution. Rather,
the oil-rig is there primarily to provide a suitable setting for the
film’s increasingly outlandish action movie content. Additionally, even
though Gene Bradley is the token eee-vil businessman, he does
not get crunched by the shark; whereas a rabid environmentalist
Eco-Guide, who has just gotten through a stirring speech against the oil
company, does. (Although her death, we feel, owes more to the
alacrity with which she shakes out her hair and poses for the camera of
one of her clients than it does to her politics. Similarly, there is
much more a sense that Gene’s inevitable demise is punishment for his
expressed interest in Kelli than for his attachment to the oil company.)
However, the longer the film goes, the more half-hearted these efforts
become; and the last third contains nothing you won’t be able to predict
one hundred percent – except possibly the mode of the shark’s disposal.
I’ll have more to say on that subject a little later.
The fact that,
rarely for a killer shark film, the people in Red Water behave
sensibly in response to the news of the shark means that the script has
to come up with a reason why someone would go into the water even though
they know there might be a shark there. It comes up with two, with
oil-hunters and money-hunters colliding in the Black Cove. One paranoid,
mouthy oil company factotum and one trigger-happy gangsta later, we’ve
got a right old mess on our hands. Red Water certainly does its
best to keep us distracted during the shark’s absences from the screen.
We’ve got fist fights. We’ve got knife fights. We’ve got gun battles.
We’ve got threatened rape. We’ve got exploding boats and oil rigs – and
a few cool shots of a shark fin cutting through the reflection of the
fires in the water. In other words, like most of the recent shark films,
Red Water is actually an action movie in disguise; but then, why
waste time and energy crafting well-rounded characters who speak
interesting dialogue and face credible dilemmas when you could just –
blow stuff up? To the film’s credit, though, it does have sufficient
clear-sightedness to have driller-turned-fisherman John Sanders turn out
to be the Least Action Hero, failing dismally at most of his attempts at
acting like a tough guy, and getting beaten up a lot by the unimpressed
criminals.
By this point in
his career – if that’s still the right word to use – Lou Diamond
Phillips has accumulated on his résumé such an impressive list of crap
films that my affection for him entirely negates my ability to pass
critical judgement on his performances. I’ll simply say that, as usual,
Lou is neither as bad as he could have been nor as good as he should
have been. Kristy Swanson, on the other hand, is good; and it’s a
shame that she’s not given more to do. At the outset Kelli is presented
as professional and competent (Swanson handles her jargon scenes well)
and also brave – she is scared you-know-what-less by the thought of the
shark, but dons her wetsuit and does her job anyway – but the longer the
film goes, and the more it turns into an action movie, the more she
becomes simply an object to be threatened and rescued. Every time it
looks like she might actually have to take action herself, she gets
knocked on the head. Hell, once even the shark knocks her on the
head! It’s disappointing, and it’s annoying.
“Annoying” also
applies to Rob Boltin and Gideon Emery’s performances, although that’s
more the fault of the script than their own. As for our criminal
quartet--- Oh. Dear. Well, Jaimz Woolvett isn’t so bad, I guess; and
Masha K. Tumisho certainly puts a great deal of effort into convincing
us that his character really is West Indian, mon. As Brett
Vanrooyen, Langley Kirkwood is Red Water’s tenth, twentieth,
fiftieth-rate Quint substitute. Professional diver Brett used to “swim
with sharks” until one day, one of them bit him. (Not that badly,
I hasten to point out: I’d love to have a scar like that!) Now,
with typical human logic, he spends all his spare time killing
sharks….and is introduced carrying his latest victim, a perfectly
inoffensive reef shark all of two feet long. Oooooh, we’re all
sooo-ooo-ooo impressed, Brett! Still – his eventual bloody death is
guaranteed from that instant, so I suppose I shouldn’t quibble. Brett
does have one good scene, in which he draws the bull shark to him by
deliberately re-opening a wound on his forehead, but most of the time
you just wish that the shark and/or Brett’s turncoat associates would
Get On With It. (Oh, yeah. Note to A Certain Other Reviewer Who Shall Be
Nameless: that’s not an Australian accent that Langley Kirkwood is
trying to do; it’s a South African accent. I guess all us colonials
sound alike, huh?)
And then there’s
Coolio. If Red Water teaches us anything, it’s that the reason
why trash-talking gangstas have to carry such big guns is so they can
terrify into silence the people who would otherwise collapse in
hysterical laughter at having to listen to the utter manure that issues
from their mouths. (Sample dialogue: “Yo’ squirrelly-ass bitch! We in
four deep with yo’ punk ass!) Coolio’s character is called “Ice”, which
not only allows Brett derisively to call him both “Ice T” and “Ice
Cube”, but sets up the jaw-dropping How Low Can You Go moment when
Coolio actually speaks the line, “Ice, Ice, baby.” After that,
any hope this film has of getting us to take him seriously is, well,
shark bait.
A few last points
about Red Water. I said that it dodges most of the Jaws
clichés, and so it does; but it still can’t resist indulging itself just
once or twice. When John hears that the sheriff is on his way to Lake
Verret, his immediate response is, “Boating accident?” A dumped,
submerged Pontiac plays a role in the middle section of the film – and
just guess what its licence plate reads? Well, that was a
Louisiana plate, after all…. More problematic is John’s send-off to the
shark. It was painful enough when the makers of Jaws 2 forced Roy
Scheider to reprise his own classic “Smile, you son of a bitch!”
send-off, turning it into the monumentally lame, “Open wide! Say ‘ah’!”
What’s worse is that ever since, scriptwriters have felt obliged to
scramble for other ways their heroes can speed their adversaries to
Shark Valhalla, most of them managing to come up with something even
more monumentally lame – as indeed J.D. Feigelson and Chris Mack did
here, with Lou Diamond Phillips spitting out, “Open wide, you ugly
bastard!” Open wide? Oh, yes. If you make it through Red Water,
you’ll be rewarded – rewarded? – with one of the more eye-opening shark
death scenes ever to grace the screen. Let’s just say that….it involves
the drill on the oil-rig, and the heretofore undocumented ability of the
bull shark to propel itself vertically out of the water. It’s not as
dumb as the ending of
Jaws: The Revenge; nothing in this world, the next world, or
Australia could be as dumb as the ending of Jaws: The Revenge;
but it sure gives it a run for its money.
Not that that is
the end. Red Water has a coda, one in which the survivors decide
that Emery, with all of his muttering about “greed” and “taking” and
“retribution”, was right all along; and that they’ll pass on the
$100,000 bounty placed on the shark. Hey, John? M’man? Pardon me for
bringing it up, but when this film opened, weren’t you in serious debt?
And didn’t you just blow up your collateral, your own boat? And aren’t
you and Kelli and Emery all out of a job?
I’m telling you,
only in the movies. Only in the movies….
Footnote:
In my last piece, I was spiteful enough to drag out the screenwriting
skeletons from within John Logan’s closet. So in fairness, I really
shouldn’t close this review without stopping to point out that many
years ago, Red Water’s director, Charles Robert Carner, wrote the
screenplay for….Gymkata.
And they said he’d
never work again….
Want a second
opinion of Red Water? Visit
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