Film Review: A Shark in Venice

I could have left the house and found myself a husband on Saturday night.

I couldn't be bothered, though. And if I had he would probably have turned out to be an idiot.

To save myself the trouble of divorce, I instead decided to watch 'Shark in Venice ' starring Steven 'I'm-the-second-most-bloated-one-after-Daniel' Baldwin . You may recall Steve from his least embarrassing work alongside Benicio del Toro and Gabriel Byrne in 'The Usual Suspects'; he played the monosyllabic figure dressed in a long black leather jacket of the sort usually favoured by Steven Seagall in his paunchier years.

You won't believe this, but this isn't actually a CGI version of Steven.

As shark films go, if you're a fan of the genre, you could do much worse than wave
goodbye to an hour of your life in front of this. Of course that depends how exciting your Saturday night alternative might be, but unless Peter Stringfellow is looking to rent a DVD, I think I’m safe.



Like sharks? You can masturbate over this if you like.

S.I.V is an amusingly rubbish, mafia-meets-good-location-meet- gorefest concoction, which follows the earlier success of 'Snakes on a Plane'. It knows its audience (probably just me, to be honest) and panders to them well. Baldwin plays ‘David’, a university professor (hmm) who goes to search for his missing father in Venice .
Alongside Steven is his pointless and incredulously young girlfriend (Vanessa Johansson), who is mostly lumped with the thankless task of being stuck on the other end of a walkie talkie acting panicky, whilst we follow Dave getting himself into increasingly hairy situations dodging the Ûbersharks in the Venetian waterways.
The film disappoints in the exact place that it shouldn’t – there is a distinct dirth of shark-related deaths whilst the Mob plot dominates.

The Baddies are easily identified by their uniform of facial hair. Beard = BAD! Got it?

If the distributors had opted for a less creature-feature-esque title, I might have felt less short-changed, but if, like me, you don’t usually resent spending a tenner on a film about a toothy fish heckling the Z-List, you will feel that you’ve ended up with a lacklustre tribute to the Godfather rather than Jaws.

CGI Venice. Wait, isn't there a 'real' Venice that they coud have used?

Don’t expect anything too ground-breaking; the aim here is to satisfy, not delight, but there is fun to be had watching David search for plastic treasure followed closely by a heavily bearded troupe of baddies. The sharks themselves are thankfully CGI-free, the lead actors pleasingly attractive in an over-the-hill sort of way, and there is a welcome lack of comedy-sidekick usually found in this sort of ‘so bad its good’ rubbish.

Splash the cash if you want a good laugh and you aren’t looking for anything too mentally demanding; don’t, if you have any sense of taste or want to remember the plot by lunchtime tomorrow.