Having just endured a full 88 minutes of what should have been ludicrous B-movie fun, I’d like to amend that to ‘Whoever wins... We lose... The will to live.’ For a film aboutwo giant-sized carnivorous predators, this is a surprisingly toothless affair. The ‘action’ begins when the battleship USS Gibson is attacked by our old chum Mega Shark, leaving a sole survivor in the gawky, whinging form of Lt. Terry McCormick (former US sit-com star Jaleel White), who just happens to be an expert in shark-attracting technology. Armed with his trusty ‘hydro-sonic balls’, he sets out to avenge the death of his fiancée, killed during the attack by camera-shake and flying exposition.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a gargantuan prehistoric crocodile (which, in one of the film’s many wasted opportunities, nobody ever actually calls ‘Crocosaurus’) has been awoken during a mining expedition, and it’s up to British adventurer and beast-hunter Nigel Putnam (Gary Stretch) to get all Steve Irwin on its scaly ass. Stretch, the former boxer who was so brilliantly menacing in Brit revenge flick ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’, plays Putnam with a combination of mumbling and squinting that makes him come across like Liam Gallagher with a bad migraine. To add to his headache the badly-rendered reptile, understandably bored by the pointless, stilted dialogue going on around it, escapes into the ocean when Mega Shark attacks the transport ship.
Brought together by NOAA Special Agent Hutchinson (Sarah Lieving in a t-shirt so tight that it practically demands a joke about her breasts being the more spectacular pair of gigantic monsters in this film), McCormick and Putnam set off on their mission to save the world, or at least a small crowd of extras who represent the world, from destruction by the bloodthirsty double threat.
Sound exciting? The set-up certainly has tons of potential to be entertaining, but the film unfortunately never evolves into the B-movie behemoth it promises to become. Instead, we’re treated to seemingly endless scenes of bitching and in-fighting between three of the least likeable characters you could ever hope to be stuck in a tiny helicopter with, as they basically argue, fail to avert disaster, and then argue some more. Rinse and repeat until seasick.
Although the bulk of the action is described rather than shown there are a few special effects sequences, which vary wildly in quality. Ranging from pretty good CG to absolutely laughable ‘toy crocodile in a bathtub’-style shots, all suffer from being used repeatedly and there’s a total lack of consistency when it comes to showing the scale of the creatures to each other or their surroundings. Shoddy effects aside, it’s the terrible porn-grade acting, the bloated, water-logged script and relentless ‘action movie’ score that really sink this wreck of a film. While some may derive a kind of masochistic pleasure from watching this sort of low-grade hokum (and I’m speaking as someone who thoroughly enjoyed ‘Q – The Winged Serpent’ and ‘Day of the Animals’ to name but two), Mega Shark Vs Crocosaurus is just too frustrating to even be considered ‘so bad it’s good’.
I’ll give a special mention to Dylan Vox, who plays a minor character called Officer Butowski with more enthusiasm and energy than the rest of the cast, the writers, the director AND the two giant mutant sea-beasts could muster between them. Because of Butowski, this one gets a generous 1 out of 5 stars... It really is a load of hydro-sonic balls.
