You have to appreciate Dolph Lundgren's tenacity to make movies, he churns out robust quantity of them in last year alone. Unfortunately, in Shark Lake he seems like just a famous name slapped into the title and poster, while being almost completely isolated from the main plot. The movie itself is appealingly bad, this is the level of sloppy presentation equal to random death scene in telenovela with silly fake shark fin, which admittedly surprising to see outside cartoon.
It all goes down in a formulaic monster movie plot, if you haven't predicted it already, there's a lake and shark on it. Cue the montage of silly party girls, stupid death scenes, incompetent authority figure, but wait, it has Dolph Lundgren. However, he's more of a subplot, separated from the rest. It's almost like an average action portion glued to a monster movie.
This is pretty disappointing since the best spark the movie has is the simple family drama. No one would form connection to plastic shark, but audience may relate to Dolph Lundgren as the ex-con trying to bond with her estranged little daughter. It is the closest to sincerity on this movie, yet it occurs too little too late.
Concerning the actual threat, it's undeniably horrible. The visual is incredibly bad, using cheap editing, poor animation effect and actual fake shark fin. The corpse of mechanical Jaws rolls on its watery grave. One can even see the drop in quality when transitioning from day to night. It looks so fake that it would've worked as parody, yet the movie insists on the gritty dark look, it's a bit sad really.
Shark Lake is, by no intention of itself, a parody of Jaws. The brief appearance from Dolph Lundgren can't save it and merely serves as timid advertisement.
