Robocroc left me feeling very meh and mildly bored, so Roboshark would have to pick up any pace in order to better. Or worse.
Regardless, it was originally one of the many shark movies making their debut on SyFy during the second annual Sharkenado Week of 2015 on the channel, and like most of you would have already guessed, indeed, it’s not a sequel at all, just shares the concept of something cybernetic getting into contact with predator animals and turning them into robotic-cyborg version of themselves.
But honestly the circumstances of the movie’s release it’s a perfect framing in what climate Roboshark came out, because it was indeed a time where everyone wanted to be in on the joke, ride the meta self-awareness sea train but deliberately doing it WITHOUT a “Don!”, engineering itself to be made fun of, to have people online live-tweet the shit out of it, to make you look at the freak, hoping that word of mouth and horrible reviews would make for unorthodox promotional material, because making that view counter go up is the only reason to make the thing in the first place.
And when everyone (almost everytime including the director itself) is in on to the joke actively for long, the joke often stops being any fun, especially when most of the jokes boil down to the characters acknowledge that “this sound like a bad shark movie that i saw last week on SYFY” .ù
The plot is basically the same one as Spiders from 2000, but instead of spiders, we have the alien technology that crashes to earth coming in contact with a large great white shark, this time being an alien prob that the shark eats, turning it into a cyborg shark, more than a robotic shark, but whatever, the plot has Pyst level of parody with a character called Bill Glates (this movie was written in 2015, i wanna remind you of that), and has the credits stylized as a messaging app.
And of course Navy Seals are called upon to “deal with it”, they always are in these movies, lead by some old TV actor you might or might not recognize.
I will say this, i’ve never seen a shark movie where the title movie monsters actually follows the protagonist on Twitter… as in, this is actually a plot point in the movie, the creature is some kind of alien that just happened to be eaten by a shark and takes over it, but manages to contact the main protags to tell them it didn’t want to do that, and he even has an ET moment.
Which IS bullshit anyway, since he ends up rampaging through a fuckin mall (it just swims through the concrete, obviously) swallowing its preys whole in a single, bloodless, offscreen chomp, saves some cash as probably most of the budget went on buying a cheap drone.
The guy livestreaming his own death by cyborg shark that just erupted out of a “Standbakes” coffee shop nets the movie some brownie points, and i will give the crew some credit for them marketing the movie via a fictional Twitter account of the RoboShark you could (and still can) follow.
But i wish they actually put effort where it fuckin matters, not in making crap that’s just barely entertaining, let alone “fun”, and it very sad when the more enthralling part of your shark movie is the montage of them spreading videos of the Roboshark online, seeing it trending and the comments online pile up, that part is cute, but it’s not really worth slogging through 40 minutes of the thing to finally have the movie elicit any kind of reaction in the viewer aside boredom and apathy.
Compared to Robocroc, the intentions of trying to make a “so bad it’s good” film are beyond transparent here, and it feels like the actors had some fun with it, but it’s barely an improvement, since it’s still an utterly boring slog to get through, one that happens to be more interesting to discuss about, but not to watch, outside of a selected few scenes that are best enjoyed as out-of-context clips on Youtube.
The entire movie is not worth the bother. BIG SKIP for me.
Wise Cafe (International) 