After The Meg surfaced in 2018 to try and take a sizable chomp out of the box office, I kind of half expected to see a flood of bigger budgeted giant shark movies follow in it’s fun-but-flawed wake. Unless you count Ben Wheatley’s upcoming sequel, the tidal wave of Meg movies never came, save for one lone entry which has come from Adrian Gruberg, the director of the stratospherically brutal Rambo: Last Blood, who once again tries to team up the rich culture of Mexico with a relentless killer obliterating anything in its path – the comparison plays even better when you realise Sylvester Stallone once played a shark himself in The Suicide Squad.
Can this brooding, eco-conscious Megalodon movie swim to the front of an admittedly short queue to overtake the goofier Meg to be the premier mahoosive shark movie on the block?
Oil man Paul Sturges has traveled to Baja with his family in tow to mix business with pleasure by fusing a idyllic vacation with his job as he oversees the decomissioning of a crumbling oil rig named Diamante the company he works for owns. However, once he, his wife Ines and his two kids Audrey and Tommy arrive, it becomes obvious that the surrounding coastal village has seen better days as it’s now overflowing with scowling townsfolk and poverty rather than the margeritas and sunshine the Sturges family was expecting. After getting called Cabrón a lot by the locals and noting that they’ve have put idols of Tlaloc the Aztec god everywhere which, we’re ominously told, have been erected for protection, Paul heads out to check on the rig itself only to find something bizarre is happening. After getting called Cabrón a lot by the locals
Not only has Diamante been leaking oil everywhere, but almost everyone on board is missing save two workers named Chato and Junior who give the corporate yes man the skinny on just how dire the situation truly is. It seems that the rampant pollution has summoned El Demonio Negro, a massive Megalodon that Mexican legends claim has come to sate Tlaloc’s anger by obtaining a supreme sacrifice to call even stevens on wrecking the environment and the giant shark has gotten off to a good start by eating the majority of people stationed on the dilapidated rig.
Even worse yet, after being harassed by thugs back on dry land and subsequently protecting themselves by smashing a bottle over one of their heads, Paul’s family has decided the safest place that they could possibly be is – you’ve guessed it – on the collapsing oil rig that’s being continuously harassed by a shark the size of a Boeing 747. How can matters get any worse, I hear you ask? I don’t know… how about a ticking bomb attached to one of the legs of the rig? That do ya?
Jon Turteltaub’s jokey The Meg may not have caused much of a ripple when stacked against other, far classier shark movies such as Jaws or The Shallows, but compared to the plodding, murky, The Black Demon, the silly, colourful, action comedy plays like it’s Back To The frickin’ Future. I’ll happily concede that Gruberg noticably doesn’t have anywhere near the same toys to play with thanks to some distractingly ugly green screen shots, but even a tight budget doesn’t really excuse how weirdly boring this movie is.
The main culprit is a script that’s as wilfully dopey as the seventh dwarf, that sees soap opera level family drama, clumsy ecological navel gazing and an impressively random subplot involving Paul’s crooked, unseen superiors trying to bump him off with a timebomb that just screams of the screenwriter desperately trying to type his way out of a story based cul-de-sac while trying to figure out how to ice this huge, finned motherfucker in the climax. Logic is thrown overboard the very second it needs a cast member to suddenly kick an uninteresting setpiece into motion and we’re supposed to gasp in shock when the toothy, filled villain is laughingly described (without a shred of irony, mind) that it’s no ordinary Meg. You know, because we see submarine-sized sharks all the bloody time these days…
Maybe The Black Demon could have kept its conical snout above water if it had some good performances or savvy direction to counteract a script that seems to have no idea what to do with its fishy villain, but unfortunately the movie comes up dry in those departments too. Gruberg seems genuinely passionate about bringing Mexican culture to the big screen by having a predominately non-white cast and having a lot of the dialogue play out in Spanish, but much like Rambo: Last Blood, he also isn’t above casting the inhabitants of the local town as stereotypical, superstitious thugs. Elsewhere he slows the tension down with some well meaning, but sloppy hand wringing about the trashing of mother nature and stages some unremarkable attacks with a CGI shark who spends a lot of time off screen in order to make the money spread as far as it can. However, even a stopped clock is right twice a day and the director manages to deal out the occasional eye catching moment usually dealing with the vast amount of severed body parts that continue to float around the vicinity, be it Audrey’s unplanned dip with the disassembled remains of the Diamante’s crew or a dreamlike moment where Junior literally catches the eye of a disembodied eyeball in the midst of an underwater mission.
The acting from the majority of the cast is… fine, but anyone who has seen Ang Lee’s Hulk is already fully aware that there isn’t a dialogue scene that Josh Lucas won’t drag out for all he’s worth and he’s on full form here. Switching from unrepentant yes man, to loving father, to a ranting paranoid, to someone who screams at his wife for putting his kid in danger – often all in the same five minutes – Lucas seems to be trying to act from the 00’s playbook of Nicolas Cage as he goes through more extreme mood swings than Homer Simpson. Watching him grandstand such pulpy lamenting as “This… all of this… it’s just incompetence, it’s negligence, it’s mismanagement. That’s what it is!”, I’m genuinely unsure if it’s an example of camp, overacting genius, or the last time we’re likely to see Lucas lead a movie ever again. For better or worse, he certainly stands out from the crowd – but so do clowns.
Shark movie fanatics (or should that be finatics) will no doubt find something to embrace, but this is one thriller that comes waterlogged from the start as the movie uses its gargantuan choppers to bite off more than it can chew.
One of the many terms that can be used to describe a group of sharks is a Grind – which is handy because it fits The Black Demon to a tee…
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