Review of Shark Swarm (2008) by Lee B — 03 Sep 2008

Shark Swarm is a below average film about killer sharks. John Schneider plays the lead and plays a similar character he played in Lake Placid 2. Daryl Hannah plays his wife and really adds nothing to this film other than a recognizable name. Armand Assante plays the swanky real estate developer and actually pulls off the performance very convincingly.

Shark Swarm must have been a made to air on television. There is very little violence, no swearing, and shitty commercial break fadeouts. Since this is part of the Manhunter series it might have been designed to air on the Sci-Fi Channel like many of the other Manhunter movies. The CGI was horrible. I give them credit for working around their limitations. Every time a shark would attack someone they would cut away and just show a lot of red in the water. They must have only done a few CGI scenes with the sharks because they would just show the same scenes over and over again. It might not have been that noticeable if they didn't show the same scene several times only a few seconds apart.

The major problem I have with Shark Swarm was that it is almost three hours long. The filmmakers could have edited this down to make this a 90 to 100 minute movie. There is no reason for it to last longer because in this case more doesn't mean better. There were several scenes that could have been trimmed like several of the random shark kills or almost every scene with the EPA agent as she was completely wasted and added nothing to this movie.

Many shark movies tend to copy or recreate scenes from JAWS. This movie is no different. They pulled out a shark tooth from a hole in a boat, a town hall meeting that was done slightly different, and there was even a scene with a shark cage.

Overall this movie wasn't entirely a waste of time. If you like bad shark movies or bad sci-fi movies then you might like this one. I am pretty sure the near three hour runtime will keep even those viewers away.