What with streaming services opening up more and more opportunities to get your movie seen on a wider scale, more countries seem to be pumping money into homegrown blockbusters that hopefully will have worldwide appeal. A toothy example of this is Mako, a 2021 killer shark movie from Egypt that literally feels like some guy in a boardroom shrugged his shoulders and went: I don’t know, everybody loves shark movies, right?
I mean, to be far, people do seem to love shark movies (between slashers, zombies and the occasion no-budget gangster flick, a big old shark flick is a sure fire way to guarantee a healthy return) and Mako wisely chooses to adopt a survival movie stance that puts it in the same category as the likes of The Shallows, or 47 Meters Down. However, can director Mohammed Hisham Al Rashidi guarantee that his shark movie doesn’t end up being mako break for the Egyptian film industry?
Documentary filmmaker Rana Bahgat should be on top of the world after winning a prestigious award, but after it turns out that the reading out of her name was a mistake (compliments to Steve Harvey), and that it was actually her husband, Sahif, who won, she returns home utterly humiliated. While she licks her wounds, she refuses to let the public embarrassment slow her down and so she galvanises her team into action to be ready at a moments notice to start filming on yet another documentary and demands that her team start brainstorming asap.
However, the winning idea comes from Gharam, a new addition to the team that tells them the story of the passenger ship, Salem Express, which sunk back in 1991, taking 400 out of the 600 souls on board to a watery grave. However, the story doesn’t end there as legend States that a mere 48 hours after the ship hit the ocean floor, a trio of drivers entered the submerged ship to grave rob from the numerous victims and as a result, the ace has exuded a noticable air of bad energy which has led to the authorities declaring it a no-dive zone. Rana is sold, and immediately gets her crew to move on this concept – but since permits are not forthcoming, she declares they will dive to the wreck anyway via more illegal means.
The day fast arises, and a group that includes Rana, her husband Sharif, Zeyad, the drugged up equipment guy, his brother, Taimour, the bumbling ideas man and Gharam, all descend to the underwater resting place to explore the Salam Express in order to secure the glory that Rana craves.
However, unbeknownst to them, a fishing trawler was in the area earlier chumming the ocean for bait and so lurking in the area is a huge Mako shark who sees this ill-advised diving expedition as a deep sea version of Uber Eats.
While I always hope that other countries leap onto the bandwagon and add their own spin to established genres such as survival slashers (the French) or zombies (Korea) that gives those types of movies a refreshing shot in the arm, I have to admit that Mako is content to simply copy from those that came before. Adopting that rather annoying, modern trope of having almost all of its cast withstand the repeated trauma of being trapped underwater with a lithe, streak of death while spending the entire time trying to emote under plexiglass diving masks. While Johannes Roberts’ aforementioned 47 Meters Down pioneered the trick of staging the lion’s share of the thrills completely underwater, there were times when it was tough telling Mandy Moore and Claire Holt apart, so you can imagine trying to keep track on eight, identically attired characters solely by their nose and eyes is virtually impossible.
It also doesn’t help that all the characters are either fairly unsympathetic to start with or so thinly sketched that the shark would probably regard them as the equivalent of a minute steak and watching them panic, complain, or out and out stab each other in the back ends up being more annoying than thrilling.
The frustrating part is that Mako spends a hell of a lot of tome with these characters before we even taste seawater on the air but all the melodrama foes nothing more but make you wish the movie could somehow bring the mako in sooner to start the job early.
The desire of Basma Hassan’s lead to snag that elusive award in the aftermath of her humiliation is tough to get on board with and the rest of her group are even worse, coming across as a gang of self obsessed losers that make it tough to believe that they could even organise a night out together let along produce an award nominated documentary. The rather dreary drama makes you long for the time when the shark gets to take centre stage, but even then, once the passable CGI beast starts digesting the cast, it’s nothing that you haven’t seen numerous times before. Drama is non-existent as we have no idea who is supposed to be who until we get small breaks in the action to reassess what actually happened and all of the attacks end up just being the shark swooping in from the corner of the frame to smash it’s victim of screen in a cloud of blood. Even the filmmakers seem to agree that it all starts to get annoying samey and so they add an unnecessary subplot with a female member of the group left aboard the boat to fend off the advances of a swarthy deck hand.
Lapses in logic aside (why does the entire production company have to dive to the ship? What can the ideas guy possibly have to offer while at the bottom of the sea?), the film does offer the occasional nugget that rises above the banality. The subplot which reveals the real reason that Gharam suggested exploring the Salam Express in the first place is intriguing enough that it would have made are far more empathetic main motive than someone just simply wanting an award and a bait and switch that exposes a supposed nice guy as being just as conniving as everyone else isn’t that bad a twist – if we actually cared.
At the end of the day, this is yet another shark survival movie that barely treads water thanks to a lack of imagination that spreads wider that the Mako’s jaws and if any future filmmakers want to sink their incisors into further attempts at the genre, they desperately need to come up with something that doesn’t leave us feeling sick to the back teeth.
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