'Deep Blue Sea 3' Review: A garden-variety shark movie that tries but fails to reel in the audience
Spoilers for 'Deep Blue Sea 3'
The 1999 shark attack thriller 'Deep Blue Sea' belongs to an absolute classic of the genre. But it looks like the franchise's quality is continuing to dive with each passing sequel. While 'Deep Blue Sea 2' was a passable sequel to the original cult classic, 'Deep Blue Sea 3' is a barely functional imitation. That's a shame to be honest because the movie really does try to be better than what it is.
The film starts off with a heavy emphasis on global warming and climate change. In fact, the first few minutes of the film wouldn't be out of place in a National Geographic documentary. But it's all downhill from there. While Tania Raymonde, Nathaniel Buzolic, and all the other actors put up satisfactory performances, we never really feel invested in the characters or their internal conflicts. And at the end of the day, it's a shark movie so we're more interested in insane shark-on-human violence than the relationship dynamics of the characters.
Unfortunately, that's where the movie fails. Sure, there's plenty of horrific bloodshed in the latter half of the movie but the film spends far too long setting up the action instead of diving headfirst into the bloody waters.
'Deep Blue Sea 3' never really finds its stride. It is no 'Jaws'. It starts out as an ecological warning and quickly shifts to a horror movie, without really hitting the beats for either genre.
There are some parts of the movie where it feels like there are two separate stories going on that keep interrupting one another. For example, there's a scene where two of the characters, Spin (Alex Bhat) and Miya (Reina Aoi) are being chased by a shark before taking a random break to profess their love for one another. One kiss later and the romance is interrupted by a jump scare with a shark literally leaping out of the water to bite Spin in half.
The filmmakers really should have figured out what they want this movie to be before making it because as it stands, we have no idea what it's supposed to be. The only real connection that we can see between 'Deep Blue Sea 3' and the rest of the franchise is that the "villains" of the movie, the three bull sharks, are revealed to be the same sharks who escaped at the end of the previous film. Apart from that, this movie is practically indistinguishable from the dozens fo shark movies that come out every year.
'Deep Blue Sea 3' was released via Video On Demand on July 28.