Sharks. Are. In. Venice.
What more do you need to know? This isn't Snakes on a Plane, you know...
Honestly, I’m chastened to read that Stephen Baldwin thinks this is his worst film. This would suggest he’s never watched about 97% of the things he’s been in since 1995.
I feel for Stephen. Not only does he have a daughter who is six squillion richer than him (Hailey Beiber, look it up), but this is an actor who appeared to have the world at his feet after The Usual Suspects. Last Exit to Brooklyn and Born on the Fourth of July just before that and then afterwards, well, straight-to-video erotic thrillers like Spider’s Web and movies like Shark in Venice. He suffered from a Hollywood system in which there were, I guess, just too many Baldwins.
Despite his declaration, Shark in Venice is not the worst film he’s ever been in (take your pick from his IMDB page, but I would put Bio-Dome and the live-action Flintstones sequel right up there). In fact, what’s really annoying about Shark in Venice – which is confusingly also known on some platforms as Sharks in Venice (plural) – is that it takes a truly magnificent premise and bottles it, for reasons I’m not entirely sure about, but I would assume budget.
You only have to watch the glorious Gallic absurdité of 2024’s Under Paris to know that sticking a great white – or several – in an urban environment can equal schlocky classic. So when the tagline here is: “The greatest predator of the sea comes to Venice”, all signs point to molto bene.
Frustratingly, Baldwin does quite a lot of things to dampen one’s ardour. He wears wide-collared Godfather shirts despite it being contemporary and can be seen sporting sandals. Tell me another action movie hero who wears sandals?!
But the most frustrating thing about this movie is that rather than it just being a simple shark flick in Venetian canals with fish chomping on tourists, writer/director Danny Lerner shoehorns an incredibly rote gangster robbery storyline into it. And so Stephen, rather than playing an FBI agent on holiday after the death of his wife or something, is an archaeologist.
Nevertheless, there are still a lot of things to like here for Great Bad Movie fans. Firstly, the local female Italian detective is called Lieutenant Totti. Then the love interest is played by Scarlett Johansson’s sister Vanessa. The person I watched this movie with turned to me halfway through and said, “I think these two actors hate each other”. I can’t attest to that, but I do know they have zero chemistry, although given those shirts and sandals, I don’t really blame Nessa.
It’s also got a really good score, unnecessarily orchestral and elaborate for a movie of this ilk. It’s by a guy called Stephen Edwards, who I’ve never heard of but seems to have some solid credits and works almost non-stop. Most importantly though, on his IMDB page is this very important nugget: “In June 2000 he was commissioned by Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan to compose an orchestral Mass in honour of a group of new chapels to be built on the grounds of the Domino’s Farms office complex in Michigan.” So there’s that. Anyway, he’s a talent.
Production design-wise though, this is impressive. Shot almost entirely in Bulgaria (with some second unit stuff in Venice itself) it looks pretty authentic to the naked eye, even if the CGI is what you would expect for a 2008 B-movie.
You get to see a gondolier getting munched and there’s a great little Indiana Jones rip-off sequence with an underground cave full of booby traps.
And then there’s arch-villain Clemenza, looking like Che Guevara at a TOWIE wedding, with a beautifully thick Italian accent and the kind of lid that blokes on their way back from Turkey can only dream of.
In a magnificently stupid ‘twist’, it turns out that Clemmie is the one who introduced sharks to the Venetian waterways – no, I don’t know why either – which makes his later queries about where his henchman have got to (er, eaten by your sharks, mate), even sillier.
By the end of the film, everything has gone bananas, but you’ll be pleased to know that it ends with a dorsal fin still combing the canals. Maybe a way to get rid of those pesky cruise passengers.
This isn’t a movie that Stephen and his son-in-law are going to settle down to on a Saturday night, nor at the Johansson family Thanksgiving when you’ve still not watched The Horse Whisperer.
But a shark movie is a shark movie and there’s always joy to be found in that, especially when you get to see some nice bridges too, even if they are either made out of foam or a back projection.
Just one plea. Next time…MORE SHARK.