Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Movie Column

Real sharks, real fear. Tom Cruise, generic thrills.

Fear is interesting stuff. Pretty much everyone is afraid of something. I really don’t like spiders, I wouldn’t say I’m absolutely terrified of them but they creep me out. Especially those big, bastard, hairy ones with sour looks on their hateful, eyeball-covered faces, just waiting for a chance to pump their venom into us. Ugh.

Some people are afraid of heights, most are afraid of commitment, and my buddy Scotty, he’s scared shitless of sharks, so much so that he gets nervous on any boat smaller than the Nanaimo ferry. However, Scotty’s fear is accompanied with intent fascination and so he’s a bit of a shark expert, and he’s the one who turned me onto to the newest shark horror movie, Open Water, released in select cities this Friday.

Directed by newcomers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau and starring no one you’ve ever heard of, Open Water is less like horror classic Jaws and more like low-budget anomaly The Blair Witch Project . This movie, shot cheaply on digital video and loosely based on a true story, focuses on Susan and Daniel, two cell phone- and laptop-addicted yuppies who squeeze a tropical vacation into their busy lives. After leaving their group while scuba diving and attempting to get as much time underwater as possible, the couple surface to find that the tour boat and guide have disappeared. It seems the guide botched a headcount before heading home, stranding our protagonists at sea. (Knowing how much attention most tourism industry workers actually pay to their jobs, I find this highly believable.)

Susan and Daniel spend most of their time laying blame on each other and arguing. This, combined with occasional bad acting, make it a bit difficult to empathize or care about the unhappy couple and the movie suffers for it.

But wait, this fish story has one hell of a hook. They use real sharks, real jellyfish, real thunderstorms. That’s right, no special effects, no computer animation. It’s the real deal. Actual sharks zipping around real people’s legs is as unnerving to watch as anything captured on film lately.

For a movie that focuses on two people bobbing in a flat blue ocean, the potential for boredom is constantly there. But Blair Witch taught us that what you can’t see is often more scary than what you can, and in Open Water we know the big, empty ocean isn’t really empty at all. The crappy digi-quality film often makes the sharp crest of a wave look a lot like a shark fin and we spend a lot of the movie nervously wondering, "What was that? Was that one?" Which is exactly what you’d do if you were in the water.

In this aspect the home-video style is quite effective, and the lack of special effects of any sort means Open Water is forced to use story, pace, character, and tension to reel us in. It does, it does indeed. Anyone that doesn’t mind low production value will enjoy this next venture into reality-horror.

Much like Blair Witch Project , cinema-goers will be split on this one and Lions Gate has chosen to open it in a select few cities this Friday, to test the waters, before deciding on a more wide scale release later this month. Even the film studio is afraid of this film, so you might have to drive to the city to see it first. In any case, you’ve got the heads up. I think Open Water rules, and my buddy Scotty will certainly agree, right after he changes his pants.

Someone else puts on a new pair of pants this week, or at least plays a new kind of role. Tom Cruise is a driven, disciplined hitman in Collateral , Michael Mann’s ( Heat) new thriller that opens Friday. Cruise is supposed to be in L.A. for one night, hired by a drug cartel to help five key witnesses sleep the big sleep. He enlists good-guy cab driver Jamie Foxx to shuttle him from place to place and Foxx ends up a hostage once he gets savvy to what’s really going on.

Michael Mann is a master of dark, deep focus cityscapes and his ghostly depiction of L.A. is truly wonderful. Unfortunately, his highly stylized approach doesn’t work as well in small spaces and since much of this movie takes place inside a taxicab, the film falters at points.

Cruise, playing a hitman, doesn’t really kill it as an actor, he fills the cliché fine (hard ass, well-dressed, focused) but there seems to be little else, no depth. Visually, Mann is a master, painting a cinematic L.A. that’s both mournful and lonely as it slips slowly into ruin but is Collateral a fresh, character-driven, epic narrative that takes us hostage and forces us to enjoy the long-night ride? I’m afraid not.

At Village 8 Aug. 6-12: Little Black Book, Collateral, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Spiderman 2, Manchurian Candidate, Cinderella Story, Fahrenheit 911, Bourne Supremacy, The Village. Aug. 6-10: Catwoman, I Robot. Starting Aug. 11: Princess Diaries.

At Rainbow Theatre Aug. 6-12: White Chicks.