Great White Review: A Beautiful Setting For A Slow Paced Creature Feature

Release date: July 16, 2021
Running time: 106 minutes
Directed By: Martin Wilson
Written By: Michael Boughen (Dying Breed).
Starring: Katrina Bowden (Piranha 3DD, “30 Rock”), Aaron Jakubenko (“Tidelands”), Kimie Tsukakoshi (Riptide), Tim Kano (“Neighbours”), and Te Kohe Tuhaka (Love and Monsters, “The Dead Lands”)

In Great White, a blissful tourist trip turns into a nightmare when five seaplane passengers are stranded miles from shore. In a desperate bid for survival, the group try to make it to land before they either run out of supplies or are taken by a menacing terror lurking just beneath the surface.

Great White starts with some idyllic scenery.  The film is beautiful with wonderful images of the Australian reef and coast.  It makes you want to take a vacation to these locations and is a nice reminder of what it was like to be outside... until the namesake shows up.  After that the film turns into more of a thriller with a tense standoff between the humans and the sharks.  And despite the familiarity of this due to some past shark scenes, the movie does avoid some of the obvious scenarios.  I kept expecting it to fall in with the Jaws tropes that seemingly inspired this film but thankfully it did not.

However, Great White has an interesting setup, but too many distractions from the core of the story.  For one, the characters have strange quirks that are used to setup the tension in the group, but also make them seem unrealistic or unsympathetic.  There is an odd beef that starts to occur early on that just seems forced and rushed, with one character acting so strange and aggressive that it really felt manufactured.  And speaking of manufactured, the sharks seemed to use a lot of CG that just takes away from the overall enjoyment of the film.  There were definitely some sections that look to have used prosthetics or models, but some of the more dynamic scenes used CG that just made the shark look like something out of a video game.  And finally, the film is slow; which is by design, but it just makes the movie go for long stretches without much occurring.  And when bad things happen, they seem utterly preventable.  It made this whole experience less exciting than it could have been.

Great White will make you long for the time when we could travel to the beaches, but the inconsistent CG, strange character quirks, and general pace of the film might cause you to stay home.

Pass on it. 

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Great White is available digitally and on demand on July 16, 2021.  

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