45. Shark Tale
This film is a weird, strange blip in the time stream. It’s hard fathoming its existence a little because it’s so not charming in the way that it tries to be hip and cool that it drowns in it's own hubris in the most embarrassingly undignified way imaginable. It’s completely unaware of it as well, which kind of makes it a bit of an interesting watch.
Yes. Despite this film’s infamous reputation of being extremely bad, I didn’t find it that hard of a watch. By the end of it, I was in agreement that it was terrible but a part of me was a bit intrigued with myself by the fact that I did notice a spark of something here. It’s very tiny and very fleeting but I did notice it.
Truth be told, the first five minutes of this film made me want to turn it off. The montage of the film showing me its strange underwater city that’s modeled after Times Square in New York, with fish mimicking human life to a stunningly absurd degree just felt wrong. There’s anthropomorphising animals and then there’s this.
There’s such blatant product placement shoved into your face from so many different things that are barely changed enough to fit the lazy fish puns they throw at you. The big jumbotron that says Coral-Cola that’s literally made to look exactly like the Coca-Cola sign, down to the same colors and font, just legit looks like it says Coca-Cola from afar, which is how you’ll see the sign most of the film.
The only good joke from that montage was the part where you cut into the Sushi restaurant and you just see this unhinged looking fish angry that no other fish are coming into his place to eat… fish.
As funny as it is though it’s one of the strange anomalies of this film that sticks out quite a whole lot when you watch it. How the happy ending of this film is supposed to work when it’s been established that, despite this film basically trying to be “they’re humans but fish”, there’s still an underlying gesture towards sharks eating fish.
Sort of?
It’s odd. They use the word “torment” a lot but it’s clear that the fish are sufficiently afraid of being eaten by the sharks due to the way the shark mafia boss, Don Lino (Robert De Niro) tries to get his son Lenny (Jack Black) to act like a real shark.
This is one of the two bright spots in the film for me. Despite how messy the metaphor is with the way it conflicts with how the movie is setting itself up, the idea that Lenny doesn’t want to be the kind of shark his father expects him to be, can’t stand eating fish and is thus a vegetarian, and pretends to be a dolphin to hide from his family can be seen as a thinly veiled commentary on toxic masculinity and the way people perceive men who don’t act how some think they’re supposed to. It could even double as a metaphor for not wanting to come out of the closet. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was, even during this time period.
It’s helped by the fact that Lenny is a genuinely likable character. Dude’s just a nice shark who wants friends and to be himself. That’s it. However, being born in the shark mafia, he’s got expectations thrust upon him that just run counter to who he is. The fact that the Don learns to accept his son for who he is at the end, coupled by the loss of his other son to push him to want that connection back, is genuinely sweet.
His little friendship with Angie (Renée Zellweger) is also nice too. She’s the love interest to the film’s main character, Oscar, and she’s also a wonderful little bundle of clarity for the picture. She’s pretty competent and head over heels for Oscar in a way that does read as genuinely cute.
The problem, once again, is that those two characters are the only real good things about the film. Everything else kind of sucks. That goes for our actual main character, Oscar, played by Will Smith.
Oh wait. Not just played by Will Smith. His fish face is designed to look like Will Smith but as a fish. Same goes for a lot of the other fish in the film and it’s very gross and hard to look at.
Despite this film coming out long after Antz, this is by far Dreamworks’ ugliest looking film. It is rough to look at. The decision to design these fish after their celebrity counterparts gives them this uncanny valley look that’s already hard to parse but it gets worse due to the movie’s insistence to seemingly just have them all pressed against the camera. Like ALL the time.
This film has so many close-ups of its ugly looking characters' faces and it’s always appalling.
This doesn’t even go into how weirdly secluded everything feels. I swear there are like only six locations in this film. The whale wash, Oscar’s apartment, the Don’s place, that one place in the city that looks like Time Square, the hideout where Lenny is being hidden, and just a blanket stretch of ocean. There’s like one or two other places but it never really feels like much of a big city and not helping is how muted and dark a lot of it looks. The colors aren’t impressive at all.
But getting back to Will Smith fish, it’s not his looks that are the worst thing about him. He’s awful on the inside too.
Granted, he’s not as bad as I thought he was going to be based on what I heard. There are moments of self-reflection and kindness he exhibits that do come off as genuine but they’re so small in comparison to the massive amount of time this film dedicates towards making him the worst person ever.
There’s literally a point in the film where he owes his boss, Mister Sykes (an Oliver reference, hah) a bunch of money. Like 5 Grand. Angie gives him a pearl that belonged to her grandmother to trade it in for that money and instead of doing that he wastes it on a Seahorse racing bet. He simply does this because he overheard from two strangers that the race was rigged and bets all his money on it in the hopes of reaching his dream of being a “somebody” who lives at the highest part of the reef in a big building with lots of money.
The horse he bets on loses and his boss tells his Rasta Jellyfish henchmen to bury him alive in the sand. Why? Well, because Sykes (Martin Scorsese) is in league with the mafia don. He can just do that despite being a weirdo who owns a car w-… whale wash.
That’s when Lenny and his brother attack them and through a… really inexplicable act of god, a random anker just falls on Lenny’s brother and kills him. Then the jellyfish henchman that ran away come back to see Oscar standing over the body of the dead shark and just assume he killed it.
Cut to a bunch of people being told the story in a way that makes it seem like the story was told so many times that it already has recognizable catchphrases that he regularly repeats when telling it. He’s dubbed “The Shark Slayer” and his massive lie is what drives the film from then on.
Yup. It’s one of those movies where the main character lies and we’re just left waiting for him to tell the truth. No consequences happen as a result of him telling the truth because he does that when his character arc is, supposedly, complete. Everyone just accepts it, I guess, because he helped the Don get back in his son’s good graces and they’ve promised to not "torment" the reef anymore. So now the sharks and the fish are friends and they all hang out at the Whale Wash even though it was established that they eat fish?
But I guess they can just eat those annoying as fuck shrimp instead. Good God were they insufferable.
That transition from Oscar “killing” the shark and him telling those stories is another issue with the film. The pacing of the scenes themselves are relatively fine but the characters move and talk extremely fast to the point where it feels like it’s being paced too fast. But it’s not. The scene is moving at a steady enough pace but because they keep running their fucking mouths, often when they don’t need too, it just feels like a normal timed scene with a bunch of fast movements and fast talking. It’s so weird.
Making it worse is the way they have Oscar talk. Will Smith is doing his Fresh Prince thing and they’re making black guy jokes through the fish. They do the crazy handshake joke with Sykes at one point and when Sykes fails they have Oscar say “A lot of white fish can’t do it” which is just… I know white fish are a thing but the joke doesn’t…
This film doesn’t work. It’s a mishmash of things that do not belong together. Zootpoia managed to take a bunch of anthros and put them into a well-crafted city and a world that made the way they lived feel plausible. It was something that was very much its own. Finding Nemo had talking fish but the ocean was still stylized like the actual ocean. This film tried to do New York underwater and they failed to capture the magic.
The entire time I felt like I was being sold something other than just Coca-Cola but I remain frustrated that I'm not able to put my finger on what. If people are watching the movie, then you've got their money already right? What were they trying to sell me? Oscar toys? Fuck no. Nobody wants that shit.
What is this goddamn city? My mind can’t process why it is they have actual couches and disco lights and lava lamps and television sets and radios and microphones for reporting the news, and a car wash… but also cars are substituted by whales who just want to get their disgusting, poorly rendered tongue muck cleaned. Police cars are visualized by killer whales with one red fish and one blue fish hovering over the top of it except somehow they blink like actual red and blue police lights AND make the sound a police car makes. It’s like it’s trying to JUST be an actual city but underwater sometimes... but also trying to have the nautical stuff act as a substitute at the same time?
Or did they just think that having actual cars underwater would be weird but not televisions, radios, and lava lamps?
Even Spongebob does this better. In that show, their phones are made of shells. They drive around boats because it’s aquatic themed. Also, it gets away with a lot of it because it doesn’t do weird shit like have the Coca-Cola sign be in the background of shots but barely changed to make it seem different or make weird race jokes between animals that don't really recognize race as a thing.
Spongebob is also, somehow, more subtle too. This film has the most basic of basic plots imaginable, to the point where with a lot of these characters they didn't even try. Lola (Angelia Jolie) is an incredibly vain, materialistic, gold digger that only gets interested in Oscar whenever he says he’s about to make a bunch of money. You know this because when she shows up and starts dancing for no reason, the song “Gold Digger” starts playing and then later in the same scene she straight up TELLS Oscar that she’s incredibly vain and materialistic. Why would he even be interested after that? Just cause she’s apparently hot? She looks gross! They all look awful!
So here's where we're at. The plot is the barest of bare bones. Most of the characters suck. The two characters that don’t suck aren’t enough to save it. And the world they inhabit is just a confused mess. It’s trying to have its cake and eat it too and none of it works. The most wholesome Oscar gets is when he’s telling that story about his dad but the film weans you away from caring about that whenever he does douchey and sometimes incredibly ODD stuff. Like that time he laughed at Lenny the Shark when he’s told by said shark that he’s a vegetarian. WHY is that funny to you? Why would you EVER laugh at a shark because of that? Sharks eating fish is something you shouldn’t want, right?!
Yeah, he does end up supporting him and making friends with him but a good part of why it’s hard for a lot of people to see past it IS because of how formulaic it all is. Everyone knows who this character is and what he’s going to do before you even see the outcome of what his lie leads to. That just makes it more infuriating to them when he gets away with it for most of the film, resolves the situation without much consequence at the end, and is just awful to everyone around him through the rest of it.
No one likes Oscar and no one really should. That tiny spark of hope I noticed did indeed exist but it faded into oblivion regardless.
Now, shockingly, despite constant bafflement, this film didn’t annoy me much past its almost soul crushing opener that basked in the glory of being everything bad about films from this era. It's never a good thing to try and be hip with the kids. You're either cool or you're not and my friends, Shark Tale is not cool.
It’s biggest sin is being so incredibly wrote. It’s easy to watch in that respect because there’s so little to think about in terms of plot that you can't help but be distracted by how discombobulated everything else is. The plot may be simple but the world they inhabit isn't and that, in turn, makes this unconfusing plot feel confused.
This is a strange, strange as hell movie despite it's watery milk toast plot.
If anything, that’s at least fascinating in its own right. I don’t know what this film is.
