Review of Swimming with Sharks (1994) by Johnny S — 15 Nov 2008

Swimming with Sharks.

They say movies about the movie industry never work, It's true, based on the numbers. Did you know there's a movie that came out in 2008 called What Just Happened with Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Kristin Stewart, John Turturro, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, and Katherine Keener. Shot for 25 million, made less than one in the box. While Industry Movies may bomb in general Swimming with Sharks fails for a couple of other reasons. 1) All the characters are one dimensional. One of my biggest pet peeves is the "naive" central character who learns about a philosopy or a way of life through various other extreme one dimensional characters. Tao of Steve, Waiting, both tolerable movies because the Tao and waiting tables are appealing to me, but they're almost painfully expositional throughout. Swimming is the same. Our lead is best known as the guy who says "What" to Sam Jackson one too many times in Pulp Fiction. He plays the role of Naive Nicky, assistant to tyrant producer Kevin Spacey, who's an asshole in every scene. Naive Nicky is verbally abused to the point of a Falling Down turn on his boss, tying him up, and demanding an apology. 2) it sucks because we start with a dead body being wheeled out of a house, dun dun dunnnnn, then we go into FLASHBACK, which no one is fond of, especially when we don't care about the characters. Fortunately the budget costs almost nothing, so when it made nothing, it probably wasn't a big deal. From what I hear the script had a ton of buzz, probably because the assistants reading it related to the character. Overall it would make a good short at best. Not much of an actual movie.