Whether you’ve noticed or not, Andrew Traucki has been diligently been hurling apex predators at hapless holiday goers for quite a while now, starting with Black Water way back in 2007. From then he’s essentially worked his way through the most famous, toothy faces that lurk at the top of the food chain by switching from crocs to sharks (2010’s The Reef) and back again for the rather bland sequel, Black Water: Abyss with a brief swing at a found footage monster movie with the mostly forgotten The Jungle dumped somewhere inbetween.
Well, he’s back on familiar territory with The Reef: Stalked, a spiritual sequel to his earlier thriller which takes full advantage of that shark movie sub-genre that’s taken hold ever since Blake Lively purged her inner trauma after brawling with a shark in The Shallows.
So once again we have a close-knit group of leggy women hoping to cure one of their own from a bout of PTSD by taking them on a potentially dangerous adventure holiday.
Jeez, with all this globe hopping and adventuring, it’s no wonder they haven’t had time to sit down and watch any number of movies that deal with the exact same thing. Although it might have saved us all some time if they had…
We meet sisters Nic and Kath as they engage in a spot of their beloved pastime of diving with their friends Jodie and Lisa, but once they’re back on shore, Kath’s noticably intense husband Greg arrives unannounced to give her a lift home. Later Nic gets an urgent text from them pleading her to come but by the time she gets there, she finds that the abusive spouse has murdered her sister in a fit of rage by drowning her in a bath tub.
Nine months pass and after all the initial horror if that day has faded a little, a still traumatised Nic is invited to take time out from traveling India to join Jodie and Lisa on a nearby island to indulge in their old beloved pastime of snorkeling in a last, final reminder of her murderer sister.
However, before we can question the wisdom of helping someone get over the trauma of a drowned sister by immersing them entirely in water, we find that Nic’s other sister, Annie, has decided to tag along primarily because she hasn’t seen her sister since she left in the wake of Kath’s death.
Of course, what starts as a girl’s trip that’s supposed to bring them closer together after tragedy soon only succeeds in bringing trauma and bitterness to the surface – but do you know what else is brought to the surface? Yep, that’s absolutely right. A huge, great white shark. Gold star for you.
Before you know it, this vacation of remembrance become a struggle for survival on record time – but while Nic, Annie, Jodie and Lisa fight to make it to the secluded island, other problems soon arise to further shit on their day including leaky boats, no phone signal and a couple of holidaying kids who don’t realise they could end up becoming a starter course for a shark with major indulgence issues.
For the longest time, Jaws stood as the obvious reference point for every single shark movie (or killer animal movie) ever made, but afterca while, the more budget friendly Open Water took over foe a little bit as young filmmakers realised that a lavish budget and painstaking effects were no longer necessary to make a chilling animal attack thriller. However, it now seems that the go to shark movie to reference these days is Jaume Collet-Serra’s aforementioned The Shallows, which saw a swimsuit clad Blake Lively essentially on her own as she attempts to stay one fin ahead of a carnivorous foe in the middle of the ocean. While you could argue that Neil Marshall’s The Descent essentially laid out the whole template, The Shallows is the one that stuck the protagonists in figure hugging swimwear and dropped them into various stressful situations in, on and around the sea; and thus, in its wake (chortle) comes The Reef: Stalked.
Why Traucki felt the need to suddenly whip up an unrelated sequel to his 2010 movie is anyone’s guess, but you’d think he’d have learned his lesson when he tried the same trick with the Black Water franchise with equally insipid results, but instead here we are with yet another batch of young adults wrestling with nature’s sharpest set of gnashers while one of their own turns it into one big metaphor as she wrestles with their inner trauma at the same time. The problem is that nothing about the movie – the story, the characters, the threat, or the trauma – is about as thrilling as watching an ice cube melt in January and there are now just too many movies have come out that are about the exact same thing, but are simply better. Hell, even just this year we had Something In The Water and it joins a school of other, painfully similar, flicks that go over the same old threads while somehow never truly exploring new waters.
What makes things extra frustrating however, is he fact that, with a slightly more savvy script, The Reef: Stalked could have had something different to say due to the slightly different kind of trauma the lead character is fighting. While most leads in films like this are “simply” mourning the death of a family figure, the fact that Nic sister is killed by an abusive husband – an altogether different kind of predator if you will – the chance was there for Traucki to draw some interesting parallels and really dig into the meat of Nic’s fears. Alas, we’re only given a surface level view of the demons tormenting Teressa Liane’s rather uninteresting main character that seems to only extend to her being uneasy in the water. However, this in turn only shines a huge fucking spotlight on the movie’s biggest plot hole – why the hell would Nic’s friends insist on canoeing in the sea when a murderous piece of shit drowned her sister in a bath tub, and further more, why would they do it in shark infested water?
Maybe this level of sloppy writing might have been forgivable if the “stalking” part of the movie (which seems to have no reef to speak of) managed to be suitably exciting, however, the shark stuff proves to be disappointingly watered down which hardly leaves you sitting on the edge of your canoe. Rather than going full digital or predominantly employing animatronics to do the deed, the director chooses to go the Open Water route and mostly use footage of real sharks awkwardly spliced into the shots. The final product is less that stellar – in fact there’s a digital shot about and hour in that makes Sharknado look like a documentary – and the shark is not inly scary, but it’s abilities vary wildly from scene to scene depending on what the script demands.
One minute its jaws are powerful enough to reduce a woodoen pontoon to toothpicks, the next a small girl is able to escape its bite with her leg only slightly mangled and it’s this kind of aquatic mismanagement that make you wonder how Traucki can be getting worse at this sort of thing when putting troubled holiday makers and carnivorous creature face to face has been virtually his entire career.
The Reef: Stalked’s grades are much like its gilled villain – mostly below the C level…
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