Shí ren sha

As in Evil does not exist - so no pun intended. Shark movies are like sand in the sea - is that a German saying or a general one? I am not sure. But there is not much to say about the movie and the story ... if one can even call it that. CGI is ... well it is I guess decent - do not expect much is what I am trying to say.

Do not expect the effects to bedazzle you ... the cliches of the characters may also ... well give you pause to think .. or make you wonder how some survived so long. Disposable characters then - I would not rate the performances, not just because of the language (I watched with subtitles), but because it is one performance ... and the script surely did not really give them much to ... play with! No pun intended ... there are way better movies to enjoy your time with.

Of course I opted to watch the 2023 Chinese movie "Shí Ren Sha", despite it laughable English title, which was "Shark Evil". This was a shark movie that I had never heard about, much less seen, and given my love of shark movies, despite the majority of them are questionable affairs, then I still opted to check out what director Huanxiang Chen had to offer.

The storyline was pretty straightforward, but writers Huanxiang Chen and Gao Feng didn't exactly revolutionize the shark movie genre, nor did they bring anything new to the genre either, for better or worse. On the plus side, then you know what you are getting here and what you are getting yourself into, I suppose. But on the other hand, the movie's narrative does leave you wanting for a bit more than what the writers collectively managed to churn out.

There are a lot of mistakes throughout the course of the movie. For example, then it appeared that the director and the CGI team doesn't know how the laws of motions work, because a massive shark that jumps out of the water to snatch a prey doesn't just instantly stop in mid-air once it has chomped down on its prey, and then drop into the water. Or the fact that a woman sitting in an inflatable raft and the shark jumped up and rammed down on her and bit her, yet the inflatable raft was untouched and still inflated. The movie is crammed with odd mistakes such as that, as the people working on the movie was not familiar with the laws of physics and motion.

I was not familiar with the cast in the movie, which is actually something I do enjoy whenever I watch a movie. The acting performances in the movie were fair enough, but nothing particularly memorable.

Visually, then the movie had some talented CGI people working on it. I liked the visual effects in the movie, because they rendered the shark quite nicely and in a believable manner as well. Well, if you look past the mistakes of laws of physics in the movie.

Was "Shí Ren Sha" a great movie? No. Was it a good movie? Well... I will say that it was definitely a watchable shark movie, but it kind of ran on autopilot, so you're not in for anything particularly extraordinary here, should you opt to watch the movie.

My rating of director Huanxiang Chen's 2023 movie "Shí Ren Sha" lands on a four out of ten stars.