Bull Shark

“Nolan, why is there a shark in the back of your truck?”

So, no water parks this week. Sorry. Instead, we go to the great state of Texas and a small town that has a pretty big problem: there’s a bull shark in the lake.

Bull Shark is about as creative as its name is: not very. There is nothing unexpected here if you’re familiar with the shark attack subgenre, and if nothing else, after this many years, I am intimately familiar with it.

It’s your very standard Jaws-style plot where a law enforcement officer must battle politics and coverups as a shark kills tourists. It was also very clearly made on a budget consisting of half a shoestring and an expired bag of chips since 90% of the movie is just characters standing around and repeating the same conversation multiple times.

For a movie with only an 80 minute runtime, we did not need three back-to-back-to-back scenes about someone pressuring the coroner to write anything other than “shark attack” as the cause of death for her autopsy. We really only needed one, even if the coroner is absolutely delightful.

She was probably my favorite, although Reema the secretary also made a pretty strong case for herself. They were both fun, vivid characters that brought energy to their scenes. Our protagonist, Game Warden Spencer… did not. He really didn't show any emotion at all, and I never felt any sense of urgency in any of his scenes. I don't know if that's due to the writing, the acting, or a combination of both but it was hard to fully engage with him.

Still, I don’t want to call him a bad protagonist. The movie did some interesting things with him. While an alcoholic with a broken marriage is hardly groundbreaking, they did show him genuinely struggle with his addiction.

It also set up one of my favorite sequences where Spencer is researching sharks (aka reading books with massive stock shark images on them) while repeatedly going to his fridge for more beer. It’s played off as rather comedic (and I don’t necessarily know if it was supposed to be), but it nudged the part of my brain that could see the bones of something much better.

There are some interesting top down shots of it swimming through the lake, but the CGI as a whole was very poor and recycled the same two shots several times. It was definitely a bull shark, though, so minor points for that.

I have to immediately take those points away, though, for very inaccurate bite wounds and also just barely showing any attacks on screen. They were mostly implied and where’s the fun in that? Absolutely nowhere. Almost all of the blood was poorly applied CGI too. I can’t even really recommend this movie as a good preteen or “Baby’s First Horror” entry point to the genre because of the copious amount of cursing.

So Bull Shark probably does fail on some fundamental level at being a shark movie. I don’t necessarily regret watching it, though. It was a decent enough time, and I did have fun. That’s a step up from last week.

Random Thoughts

There is an implied dog death, but nothing is shown on screen. Not even blood.

I still don’t know if the shark was supposed to be an adolescent, a baby, or what was happening with it. It seemed to change size every other scene.

I also don’t know why the shark expert kept talking about the Great Lakes when they were in Texas, but whatever. That might have been a more interesting setting!

There are apparently two sequels. I don't know if I will ever review them, but they do exist if you wish to seek them out.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.

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