This month on Shark Week (because Shark Week seems to last longer than a week these days, right?) is Great White Waters (now on Tubi), which finds director Anthony C. Ferrante fishing around for more cheap thrills in the no-budget apex-predator subgenre. See, Ferrante directed the infamous Sharknado and its five sequels, as well as another tooth-and-fin Tubi original, Blind Waters (one of five movies he helmed in 2023). If that’s not enough to establish Great White Waters as a likely Z-movie, it’s also a product of notorious mockbuster churner-outter The Asylum, the most shameless production house in the biz, which may have a bunch of you packing your bongs and settling in for a hot summer’s hoot, which might be the only way to enjoy it.
The Gist: Prepare yourselves for a whole buncha egregious chum shots, friends! DATELINE: THE FLORIDA KEYS. An airplane drops four crates into the ocean, and even though they say they have tea in them, you know they’re actually full of something else. Right: That one copy of that one Wu-Tang album. No! That’s a joke! They’re full of drugs! Several grimfaced mofos buzz out to retrieve the shit under cover of darkness, and the low thrum of the string section on the ripoff musical score tells us not to worry about the names of these characters, because they’re about to get their boat sunk and their butts eaten by sharkie-warkies.
Cut to FIVE YEARS AGO. We meet Gia (Angela Cole) and her hubs, who surprises her with a boat on their Florida honeymoon. This is when we learn the hubs plays the ukulele, which means he must die. Sure enough, by the time we jump to the present day, he’s kaput, and Gia hops in the boat and sadly reaclls that happy moment when they motored out into the Gulf and he strummed a mealy love-tune he wrote just for her. She doesn’t notice the sharknage from the night before, but does find one of the lost jars of “tea” during a solo scuba jaunt. And she does what anyone would do when one finds a jar full of cocaine at the bottom of the ocean – stick it in a cupboard and go fishin’.
We also meet Mr. Reverend (Steve Hanks), a sleazy drug lord who wants his “tea” real bad. After he hangs out with the governor of Florida and establishes the movie’s Political Subtext, he assembles a squad of adbasses to fetch the goods, led by Jareth (Johnny Ramey), a scary woman named Charlotte (Ashton Leigh) and a sniper, Paulina (Michelle Ng Mini), who’ll park in the crow’s nest and try to pick off anything with a big dorsal fin. There’s a few other unsavories in the crew whose names should just be Brunch, Snack and Shit Sandwich, because we know why they exist in this plot.
So our bad guys motor out and run into Gia out there, where sharks leap out of the water to take a toothy swing at whatever important item the humans are trying to retrieve. I mean, it’s like the sharks have read the script or something. The bad guys squabble, Gia gets tangled in the mess, guns are pointed at heads and Gia is the only one around here capable of stabbing a shark with a pointy piece of metal in order to not get eaten. She seems to know a lot about sharks, more than you could learn by watching a month-week’s worth of cable-TV shark content. She even has an electronic thingy that’s like a shark EMP, the modern equivalent of shark repellent. Batman would be hella jealous.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you’re going to give us shitty CGI sharks, at least have a gimmick like Under Paris, where an XXL swimmy-biter fins its way into the city’s famous catacombs.
Performance Worth Watching: Cole has the most noteworthy “character arc” in this movie, but she mostly just comes off as the Ollie’s Bargain Outlet Sarah Michelle Gellar. So Ramey is our guy here, I guess, since he tries to fill the charisma vacuum with a third-act Oscar speech about how they’re “surrounded by god. Damn. Sharks!”
Memorable Dialogue: Ukelele Joe says something one should never say on one’s honeymoon: “You know me, I like to get in, get it done and go home.”
Sex and Skin: None. There is no getting in or getting it done in this movie.
Our Take: Sorry, but the thrills in Great White Waters are as limpdicked as Ukelele Joe on his honeymoon. And the comedy is almost as flaccid. There’s one halfway decent joke about filling out employment forms to work for a drug lord, but its sad-trombone delivery leaves it dangling on a noose, making us sad. I mean, think about it – a mercenary sharpshooter with an LLC and tax ID, griping about the cost of health insurance for the self-employed? That would be funny. Funnier than whatever campy nonsense this lazyass movie thinks is funny.
I get it. Sometimes a movie with a no-logic drivel plot, laxative dialogue and the effects budget equivalent of a two-dollar Five Below gift card doesn’t come together effectively. Making a movie isn’t easy, ever, and Ferrante has proved it over and over and over and over and over again, just in 2023. He throws in a couple of plot twists to make things “interesting,” but fails mightily to innovate on the same old boring shark shit, leaving us with the feeling that the subgenre exhausted itself with Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf or Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre or Sharkboy vs. Lavagirl or Baby Shark’s Big Movie. I had more fun looking up shark movie titles than watching Great White Waters, and that’s the sad truth.
Our Call: Great Shite Waters. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.