First of all I must say that I was lured in given the title of the movie, as I am a fan of the creature feature genre. And yes, there is just something fascinating and interesting about sharks in particular. But the title alone for the movie had B-movie screaming all over it, and when the SyFy name appeared, I must admit to a 'oh, one of those types of movies!' thought crossing my mind.
But still, I decided to sit down to watch the movie, because it is sharks after all. And who knows, SyFy have been known to make a great movie every now and then. They are rarely, but they do exist.
As for the acting in the movie, well I was familiar only with John Savage, and he is always fun to watch in movies. It was really hard to take Jonathan Pienaar serious in this movie given his body gestures and way of acting, whether it was called for in the script or it was his style, I have no idea, but it sure was annoying.
"Empire of the Sharks" falls prey to the usual SyFy level of special effects and CGI. So don't get your hopes up. The effects and visuals are there and they function well enough for their purposes, but they are not impressive eye candies to behold. And the fact that the sharks were growling menacingly as they were swimming about was just ridiculous.
There was something in the movie that was taken directly out of "Conan". It was the scene where chained people were working some kind of milling wheel. A subtle homage or just a random coincidence? Who knows...
I suppose that "Empire of the Sharks" can best be classified as "Water World" meets "Jaws".
The storyline in the movie was easy to follow and required no complex thinking from the audience; so it is essentially just to lean back and watch the movie here. However, the concept of an army of sharks controlled by someone wearing a pair of gloves was somewhat difficult to accepts as a serious idea.
For a shark movie then "Empire of the Sharks" was not overly impressive or particularly enjoyable. It is just another movies in an endless line of less than mediocre shark movies that clutter the genre.
