Great White Parent Guide

Business isn’t what it used to be for Charlie (Aaron Jakubenko) and Kaz (Katrina Bowden). They’ve been struggling to get their seaplane tour company back on its feet, but new customers are hard to find. So when Joji (Tim Kano) calls in for an extended tour to a nearby island with his wife, Michelle (Kimie Tsukakoshi), Charlie jumps at the chance. But once they get there, they find evidence of a fatal shark attack in the form of a bloated corpse on the beach. Worse, while they’re searching for more information about the dead man, a colossal shark takes a bite out of the plane’s pontoon. Now they’re stuck on a small rubber life raft, drifting in the ocean current, without food or water, and with a massive and clearly hungry shark in the water. The only question is how many of them will survive in the time it takes for the raft to drift to shore.

As I’ve said before, I have a fondness for shark movies: Jaws was one of my favorites as a teenager, and one of the first films I reviewed for Parent Previews was The Meg. There’s just something about the mix of beach fun and prehistoric ocean predators that makes for good entertainment. And no, before you ask, it’s not the bikinis – this movie is a wetsuit only kind of picture. I’m not here to ogle the future fish food – I just like sharks, ok?

If movies went flat like soda, I’d say this one’s been open for about two hours. Not long enough to be nasty, but long enough to lose all the sparkle. If you’re looking for perfectly adequate summer entertainment, this is your movie. You will not be surprised, challenged, or, hopefully, experience any intelligent thought. That’s the point of a big summer shark movie. It’s not like Jaws was asking any big questions either – unless “d’you think that shark might be fake” counts as a big question. And really, that question kind of answered itself.

Negative content here is primarily profanity, which came as a surprise to me. Usually with shark flicks, there’s a good deal more gore. Now, there’s still a little bit of that, primarily in the slightly bloated form of two properly chomped corpses our heroes find, but mostly the other characters just… slip beneath the surface, leaving some ripples and a spreading cloud of blood in the water. The sharks have it way worse than the people as far as gore is concerned – flares in the mouth, repeated stabbings, impalement, the works. I guess that’s what you get for trying to eat people who really, really don’t want to be eaten. Maybe they should just stick to the fish.