Low budget killer shark movies seem to descend onto streaming services these days with the swarming ferocity of a feeding frenzy as each cash-strapped title thrashes and death rolls to desperately get your attention. As of late, the genre seems to have mercifully dropped the weird gimmicks (Ghost Shark, Exorcist Shark, Jurassic Shark) in favour of adopting an incident driven thriller stance – but while the content has sort of matured, the depth of talent seems to remain the same.
This I why I had a small amount of hope for No Way Up, a high concept disaster movie that looks to try and meld your usual sharky shenanigans to a plot strongly resembling Airport ’77 which saw a cluster of jobbing character actors stranded at the bottom of the sea after a plane crash.
However, while No Way Up can’t possibly hope to score a cast featuring the modern equivalents to Jack Lemmon, James Stewart and George Kennedy (best it can do is Colm Meaney), it seems willing to try a little harder than your average finned fare in order to bring at least a little tension bubbling to the surface.
Ava is preparing to board a flight with her boyfriend, Jed, and his shitty buddy Kyle, in order to enjoy a nice, relaxing holiday in Cabo. However, thanks to Ava being the daughter of a prominent politician, she’s never really had to go out and be free of some sort of surveillance which has left her rather timid and unsure of herself in stressful situations. So, unsurprisingly, Ava’s personal bodyguard, Brandon, is tagging along much to her friend’s amusement, but underneath Brandon’s craggy exterior lies deep guilt over the drowning of Ava’s mother which happened on his watch.
Stepping away from Brandon’s textbook movie bodyguard trauma, we also meet a few other passengers on the plane such as young Rosa and her doting grandparents, and Danilo, a gay flight attendant teased by Kyle and before you can take bets of who will survive until the end credits, the plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean after a flock of birds fatally migrate to the avian afterlife by taking a direct route though one of the engines.
The plane crashes and a ton of people die, but after the plane settles upon the sea bed, a handy air pocket at the rear of the craft, allowing the characters I just named to survive that little bit longer. However, their survival instincts are given an impressive workout by the extra threat of a bunch of sharks sniffing around the hole in the fuselage who are prone to yanking the occasional survivor to their doom or noshing on the odd rescue diver.
As the plane starts to gradually slide closer to the edge of an underwater cliff and the pressure on the outside starts to increase, Ava – so far out of her comfort zone it’s crazy – has to pull herself together in order to pull a risky escape.
So, does No Way Up manage to float itself above the usual flotsam and jettson this genre usually provides? Honestly, not really, but one thing director Claudio Fäh (Hollow Man II) can console himself with is at least it’s obvious that he actually tried. For a start, some of the visual effects, while hardly photo realistic, don’t look as aggressively awful as you’d expect. The plane crash is actually pretty decent as the scene wisely avoids numerous expensive exterior shots of the plane in favour of having interior sequences of some people dragged screaming out the hole in the side and others flying around the inside of the cabin like out of control human moths. Additionally, the sharks look pretty solid too as they strictly behave like actual animals instead of blatantly CGI bath toys that have the intelligence of a chess grand master and the instances of them locking their formidable jaws on a hapless meal are admirably passable.
However, while the obviously limited visual effects and some string editing that smartly focuses on the small details of the action (the flight path of whizzing debris, or the instance of a passing tail slapping the goggles off someone’s face), No Way Out is ultimately undone by its cast and some insipid writing. Those of you whose knowledge of disaster movies and killer shark movies barely date back a decade should quite happily follow the action with relative enjoyment, but if you haven’t seen Deep Blue Sea, Airport ’77, any of the Poseidon movies or even Snakes On A Plane, then I’d suggest that any of those may be a better use of your time – well, maybe not Airport ’77.
Colm Meaney, to his credit, tries to add a bit of gravitas before a Samuel L. Jackson-esque twist sees him cashing his paycheck early, but everybody else are happy to remain solidly within their comfort zone and they might have well first appeared on screen with title cards immediately stating their fate for all the suprises the movie manages to muster. You’re not even that sad when they bite it either (pun intended) as they’re all a fairly irritating sort if I’m being honest. If they’re not being insipid, they’re trying to force a grindingly annoying sense of gallows humour down your thought and it often gets so annoying, you’d wish you could volunteer to shove them into the maws of the waiting sharks yourself just to move things along a bit.
But between some awful line readings (“You’ve lost your leg below the knee, Jed.” is delivered with all of the emergency of informing someone that their parcel hasn’t arrived yet, or they just missed a bus) and some half hearted gore (the mangled leg in question looks more like someone’s created a stump out of pink silly putty), No Way Up struggles to breach the surface in order to offer up an emotion other than mild interest when you should be gripping your seat cushions as tightly as a shark’s laughing gear is clamped on the doughy midsection of a slow swimmer.
There are worse shark/disaster movies, to be sure, and as I stated before, the filmmakers really strive to do something substantial with a total budget that’s far less than what Jason Statham got paid for Meg 2 (far less) – however, there are blatantly better ones too, that are more tense, fun and scary to boot. If you’re a killer shark movie enthusiast that need a regular fix of rampaging murder fish, then by all means have at it, but the more discerning connoisseurs of carnivorous sea life might look at No Way Up and simply declare no way Jose…
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 