To crib from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this movie is hereby subtitled, “Pigging out at the All-You-Can-Eat Moron Bar.” Which is kind of sad since I thought everything that happens up to the first shark attack is pretty good. Decent characters, decent interactions, and they seem to be making rational decisions. And then the IQ of the characters and script simply sink… like 47 meters down.

Great White is mostly an alleged shark attack movie about five people stuck in a life raft while being hunted by sharks. But as a shark attack movie, it barely qualifies until the eye-gougingly annoying final 20 minutes. As a survival-at-sea movie, it’s ok for a little bit and then it just goes on and on and on and on with almost no discernible thought or intelligence or logic. This is a deeply inert movie completely uninterested in either genre it plays in.

As a survival-at-sea movie, you sir are no Life Boat. Or All Is Lost. Or even Adrift. It’s five dummies aboard a life raft who we see take one, maybe two actions to stay alive. We get no references to food or fishing so we have no idea if they are hungry or not. We get no indication of sun exposure. We get one scene of catching rainwater in a plastic bottle (ignoring the rubber bag they have random supplies in).

So even the basic scenario this movie wallows for 3/4ths of its runtime in fails. It doesn’t even try to do human drama. I hate movies where people just bicker at each other but at least that would have been something. No… we get a few pieces of dialog while we drift. And drift. And drift even more. Was this suspense? Is this suspense? Did I fall into the Twilight Zone?

So about those sharks… they are out there (our characters assure us, having no visual evidence). And mainly, when they do bother to make an appearance, its because our characters did something stupid… and then keep doing stupid things. Oh, and the sharks roar… and there’s a weird whale sound on the soundtrack… not sure if that was meant to be the shark or just atmosphere.

I’ve said it before but it’s hard to get too angry at a horror movie for its characters being dumb because if they were smart, there’d be no movie. Well, this movie is an exception because it’s constant (once the movie remembers its a shark attack movie). It’s annoying, its frustrating. When you yell at the screen in a horror movie to “JUST SWIM!”, it should be out of fun. Not abject annoyance.

And, yes, they all deserve to be eaten by sharks.

Clearly the more intelligent species.

Score: 62